


Order 3066

by Dailenna



Series: No Dream of Her Own [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Backstory, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Ishbal | Ishval, Ishval Civil War, Past Abuse, Strategy, Suicidal Ideation, horror of war, wartime philosophy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:42:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 71,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22915690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dailenna/pseuds/Dailenna
Summary: "I entered the Ishval War in my final year of training at the military academy. Usually a cadet is sent to the battle field for acclimatisation during one's graduating year. In my case the academy happened to be based in the East Area. They were short on manpower then, so I was dispatched to Ishval ... In the end I gradually became embroiled in the conflict."Everyone who returned from Ishval changed, and Riza Hawkeye was no different. She caused more deaths than any other person - not only with her own hands, but also with the weapon she unleashed upon the world. No-one could return from a massacre like that the way they were before.
Series: No Dream of Her Own [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608523
Comments: 148
Kudos: 35





	1. Prologue

Cadet Hawkeye zigzagged through the cafeteria with her tray, looking out through a sea of uniforms. Usually the drills were organised so that platoons and teams rotated in and out, and there was plenty of room for everyone, but something had disrupted today. There were whispers of news about the ongoing Ishval Rebellion, and one of the drill instructors had been removed from his station just this morning, throwing the supervision roster out of schedule.

A hand waved in the mass of people, drawing Riza’s attention to Rebecca Catalina as she pointed to the bench next to her and the half a space on it. Riza gave a nod, and Rebecca started pestering the other cadets on the bench to make a bit more room as she approached.

With an “Excuse me,” she squeezed in at the table, which was now crowded shoulder-to-shoulder. Rebecca scooped her food over to one side of her tray, so Riza had space to put her tray down without covering anyone’s food.

“Have you heard what this is all about?” Rebecca asked, her eyes wide and incredulous.

“The drill instructor?”

“Yes, Major Jonas – but Order 3066?”

“What’s that?” Riza asked, spooning some of the beef stew into her mouth.

Rebecca let out a gusty breath. “Well, you know how Ishvalan rebels destroyed that train station? Reports came out that Amestrian Ishvalans have been conspiring with the rebels, so the military has had to close ranks – that’s why they took Major Jonas. Apparently he was sowing discord, or something like that.”

Riza frowned. “Really?” Jonas had been one of her instructors last year – he was exacting and reticent. Not the sort of guy to talk about personal things with equals, she would have thought, let alone try to brainwash his cadets. He had seemed no different to any of the other instructors.

“But that’s only the first part of the order – now they’re sending the State Alchemists to the front!”

Alchemy on a battlefield. It seemed an odd juxtaposition to Riza, who grew up seeing alchemy as an academic pursuit, used at most for fixing household things. They would be able to use alchemy to help create barricades and defences faster than ever before, protecting the troops from Ishvalan attacks. They could repair broken weapons, create camouflage, purify drinking water and keep food fresh for longer. It could be an all-around improvement in quality of life on the front lines, but alchemy wasn’t meant for the front lines.

A spark streaked across her memory. A streak of fire travelling from a struck flint, all the way to an unlit candle. A useless trick that would give away their position in war, but that was the start of something else that could be used for so much more.

“I can’t believe that Major Jonas would be a part of the rebellion,” Rebecca said, buttering her bread roll. “Amestris is doing so much for the Ishvalans – improving the infrastructure, the healthcare, the economy … Why would anyone fight it? The sooner the alchemists get in and take out the rebels, the sooner we can fix up all of this mess and continue – you know – improving people’s lives. This is getting too close to our civilians for comfort.”

“They’re sending the alchemists to fight?” Riza asked.

Rebecca shrugged, getting a dirty look from the cadet she was squashed up against on the other side. “What else would they be going for? This is the military, after all. Anything to keep our soldiers safe and end this faster.”

Riza had to admit that it would end things faster, if the alchemists were a part of the fighting. From what cadets were learning in their training, Ishvalans used guerrilla tactics that made a regular military fighting force ineffective. Her own training as a gunman and sniper was a step away from the usual formations and trenches used on other fronts. Alchemists would add a touch of creativity and resourcefulness to the tactics currently at hand. It could be a highly effective move – enough to dishearten the enemy and prompt a surrender and the peace Amestris was looking for.

This was what alchemy was made for: serving the people. The alchemist’s mindset was also why Riza had signed up for the military, but as they got closer and closer to deployment, the butterflies in her stomach grew. Was it right? Was it enough? All the instructors impressed onto the cadets how much they needed to be unwavering when they came to battle. If one link in the chain broke, the whole line was weakened – her indecision could allow the enemy an opening to strike. So, when it came to it, Riza was going to have to pull the trigger and kill a person. But she did it so that she could protect people.

It was an echo of a beautiful dream that had spurred her forward when she had nothing else to do, nowhere to go – after all, the only other option was to fall back into nothingness. She had no ambition, had never been taught to dream or for herself, only to serve those around her, and so when she had no-one left, she offered her service to the nation and to the innocent people who had their own dreams to follow. A country at peace was the only hope she could claim.

“It’s not long until we get sent out,” she said with a sidelong glance at Rebecca.

“I know.” Rebecca’s tone was commiserating. “I’m so on edge to find out where I’m going. They’d have to send snipers near the front, wouldn’t they?”

Riza mulled it over. “Most likely. Although they may need a team or two to help root out the rebels attacking further inland, and for some blocking action in our supply chain.”

“Huh. What if I get sent to some backwater town where nothing’s happening, and I fall asleep from boredom?”

Riza let out a laugh. “If only things were that boring.” She thought for a moment – one of the instructors had definitely mentioned this already, and he’d mostly said they could get tips from the people already in the field as to what was safe and helpful in each environment, but what had he mentioned? She listed the things as she recalled them: “Chew gum. Learn the native birdcalls. Smoke, but only if you can do it without giving away your position.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rebecca said, waving a hand dismissively.

Ignoring the hand, Riza wagged a finger in Rebecca’s face. “Memorise the map. Mentally transcribe what you see onto paper. Just so long as it doesn’t distract you from your duty. Don’t look anywhere else. Don’t you dare!”

Rebecca laughed and pushed the hand away. She flailed a dramatic hand over her forehead. “What am I to this country – a trigger finger and a pair of eyes? Can’t you tell my boobs are down here?”

A quick snort burst out from Riza – and also, apparently from a few of the guys around them. She ducked her head down, smile gone.

“I don’t want to hear anything from you, Jameson,” Rebecca said, humour suddenly missing from her voice. “To you I’m a trigger finger and nothing else.”

One of the cadets on the other side of the table got up with his tray. “I’m sure you can be whatever you want, little lady – you’ve already got them fixing up your shooting scores.”

Riza tore apart her bread. For the stew.

“Oh, do they bring them down so you don’t look so bad?” Rebecca hissed at his retreating form.

There was no response, but as Riza looked up she caught the tail end of an obscene gesture. She returned to her bread, cheeks warming. A few of the other cadets around them were packing up and leaving, chattering with each other and ignoring the scene that had just happened. Not saying a thing.

The comments like that – the gestures like that – mostly came from people who had been in other platoons. Riza’s original platoon had been fairly decent, and they all understood why she’d been singled out for the sniper track – it was as plain as the target at the end of the range. The instructors hammered home that each platoon was its own tight-knit lifeline, so everyone put pressure on each other to keep social dynamics acceptable, which meant that those people with egos to preen tended to look outside of their platoons to gain satisfaction. Being accustomed to it didn’t make it any less embarrassing.

As more space appeared around them and they were able to un-squash from the people on either side, Riza finally looked up at Rebecca, who seethed over her empty tray.

Rebecca let out an angry huff of air and met Riza’s pointed stare. “I’m not going to change who I am just because a few creeps can’t handle that we’re shooting better than they are. I’ll make whatever jokes I want. My target audience is a slightly higher demographic.”

Riza looked back at her tray. She took a breath and let the adrenaline settle. She glanced at Rebecca again and dared to quirk an antagonistic eyebrow. “Slightly.”

Rebecca grinned. “Slightly.”

\---

It seemed like one minute Roy Mustang was a simple Lance Corporal and the next he was a certified State Alchemist, suddenly seven or eight ranks above his peers. They said the early ranks went by quickly, especially in war times, but he felt like he had whiplash and was still trying to comprehend where he was. Then while the people he’d done his cadet training with went off to fight under the command of war-hardened generals, he stayed comfy in Central City with a big library to study out of and a Brigadier General breathing down the necks of the instructors to give this single alchemist his own range to practice accuracy and intensity of his transmutations.

The higher-up officers seemed thrown for a loop – they were all wondering where this kid had come from – this guy barely out of his teens who had somehow managed to harness fire when they’d never heard of it being done. Even with months of practice in private before applying, Roy was still learning how to control what he had learnt so he didn’t singe his own hair when a fire whooshed up. Manipulating the very air and atmosphere around a group of people, where it changed with each breath, where his materials scattered with the very wind, was not an easy task. But the military loved him. He made fire, and they wanted firepower.

There had been a level of freedom, when they encouraged him to research more, to see what else he could learn, if he had been so clever as to figure out how to make fire with alchemy. He could manipulate the earth, build things, restore household objects, but every alchemist worth the name could do that. When he admitted to them it was a dead man’s research that he had merely taken up, their interest in his research capabilities dropped, and suddenly his job as an alchemist was to make fire and nothing else.

His job was to learn how to harness a roaring fire to build a barricade between Amestris and its enemies so that one day there might finally be peace for a country that seemed to always be at war. A war he had finally been ordered to join.

He looked into the rucksack laying on his bed. Change of clothes, extra socks, mess kit, canteen. He didn’t know if there were any personal effects he had that were worth bringing. Maybe that’s what the gloves counted as. They were what he’d spent most of his research time and funding on. Some alchemists had tattoos, some of the more physically-inclined had gauntlets. All of them had to carry their arrays with them somehow. He needed more than just his array – he needed that spark.

One pair of the gloves were promptly buried in the rucksack, the red salamander disappearing into his bag, and the other went into his coat pocket. With all the time training – exploding dummies at a distance, practicing pin-point attacks on them – the initial memories and associations were starting to fade, but sometimes, still, sometimes he remembered that girl who he’d thought was just some shy kid, and the red ink that stained her skin. He remembered wondering if he should have been there to protect her from that. Yet she gave him this gift so he could protect the country, and so he’d honour her by making it safe for people like her.


	2. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise if this work seems disjointed - I don't often get to write for long periods, so there's a lot of stopping and starting! I'll smooth each chapter over before posting, as much as I can.

The cadets packed into the back of the truck all swayed with each other and against each other, nervous chatter picking up and dying down regularly. They held their weapons almost like an after-thought – just a prop to go with the costume. Riza’s rifle had its butt to the floor, and she tried not to lean too heavily on it as the truck bumped over the ragged terrain. She’d seen a glimpse out of the canvas flaps on the back of the tray – all dust and rocks, with jagged, rocky mountains rising up, not the rolling sand dunes she imagined when she thought of desert.

Ishval was a front entirely unlike any other. The fighting on the western border of Amestris was done in trenches, and in the north, before the standstill, battalions rose up against each other. The Ishvalans weren’t a battalion type of people, though. They had no official army, just a militia and their warrior-priests who were like berserkers, human-cannonballs who fought with the rage and might of their god. If one of them found their way into a trench, they could demolish a whole platoon or two before someone got a lucky shot and took them out. The ground was too hard for trenches anyway.

That was why it was a war waged in the cities. That was why the extermination order had come through – a militia meant that any Ishvalan could be an enemy. No one was an innocent. The Ishvalan annex had been fighting for seven years without hint of surrender, and this was all that could be done to protect Amestris. How many dozens of strategies must have failed before they’d finally turned to extermination, Riza didn’t know, but here she was, about to do her duty for her country.

She was the only sniper cadet travelling with a fresh platoon of cadets on its way to replace and supplement soldiers who had been there for too long. When they reached the field, she would be joining a sniper team to make up for a lost team member, and so while these cadets put their bodies right in front of the enemy, she would be hidden. Hiding. Not safe, perhaps, but hiding nonetheless.

“Well, if you can shoot one of those warrior-priests as well as you shoot targets, we’ll be safe as houses,” said the cadet next to her. Evan Ryan. He had spent the entire ride trying to pass time with idle talk while his leg jittered up and down. They’d shared the gun range a few times, and his marksmanship was, well, good at closer ranges.

“They’re a mite bigger than those clay pigeons, hey?” said a cadet from across the row. Isaac Fairchild. He was a friend from Riza’s first platoon before she had been moved to the sniper track. A perpetually hopeful expression made his face open and friendly, and it was good to have familiar people around, even if only briefly.

“I’d hope so,” Riza murmured.

Evan smiled. “Anyway, Colonel Grand will do most of the work for us, so it’s not like we’re joining a regular battlefield.”

“It’s weird – more like guard work than soldiering,” Isaac said. “But if Colonel Grand really isn’t that bad, then it’ll be okay.”

“Yeah. We just have to stay out of the way of his guns,” Evan said with a laugh.

The idea of what alchemy was had changed drastically in the last months, since the State Alchemists had joined the battlefield. It was no longer an act of repair and healing, but a source of weapons. Colonel Grand, the Iron Blood Alchemist, was like a walking tank. He could transmute artillery into an armour-like covering, and let loose a barrage in the middle of the enemy. The platoon’s job would be to get him safely behind enemy lines, then get out of his way so he could get to work. Most alchemists would still be vulnerable at that point, but Grand tended to create his own fully-loaded turret to attack from. With only his head exposed, and laying down his own cover fire, he made a pretty solid defence. It wasn’t great for mobility, but when they changed location, that was when the platoon was essential. So at least they weren’t there for nothing.

“Maybe he’ll leave some Ishvalans for us,” Evan said, “you know, to give us some experience before we’re sent back to graduate.”

“It’s all battlefield experience, whether we get into any fights or not. Finding a safe offensive position? That’ll come in handy when we get deployed in future conflicts, whether we have alchemists or not.”

Riza glanced toward the cab of the truck. The bumping over terrain was becoming less jarring as the vehicle slowed. There was a window through to the cab, and past the driver’s head, Riza could see a sliver of rock. A wall? The truck came to a stop and everyone in the back straightened up, conversations faltering as they readied themselves for attack or action. Then the truck started moving again, and the wall made way for beige tents. A checkpoint, Riza noted, and she stayed at the ready. Somehow, over the course of the trip the thought of the enemy had dulled back into a hypothetical, but now they were in the Amestrian camp, near the fighting, it was drawn to the forefront.

A few minutes ticked by, with the truck humming along lazily until it came to a stop again, and the engine clicked off. The canvas was unzipped and snatched back, streaming light into the dark interior, and Riza was struck by how at risk they were as she blinked to while her eyes adjusted to the light. But it was an Amestrian soldier, already barking at them to get out and line up.

It seemed as though all commands were given in a bark – they were dogs, after all, and so they needed to be communicated to in a way they understood – but with time and experience Riza had learnt to differentiate volume or precision of speech from aggression. Body language helped a lot. As the cadets filed out with their weapons and packs, Riza noted the Sergeant Major addressing them narrowed his eyes as he looked up from the clipboard he held. Best to avoid extra questions, if he was already irritated.

Her feet landed on hard ground and she straightened quickly, moving out of the way of the next person as she shouldered her pack and rifle, and stepped into line with the others. Another truck pulled up behind them with the other half of the platoon, and the Sergeant Major strode off to bark at the others, too.

The tents she had seen through the window turned out to be medical tents, identifiable by the small red cross on the outside of them. Riza took in the scene around her: a broken wall sheltered the medical tents, rubble pushed up against it possibly so that Amestrian soldiers could climb it for a protected shooting spot, should the Ishvalans rush the camp; a fortress-like building lay beyond the wall, windows so small and high on the walls that they revealed nothing about the interior – a prison, perhaps; an open expanse had stations for campfires, where food was being ladled out of large pots into the cups or trays of waiting soldiers; a handful of horses were tied up to posts near a fly-tent, where a few men were preparing feed bags for them; derelict one- or two-storey buildings sat around the expanse, the odd soldier on the flat rooves barely visible but looking out to the city not far beyond these outskirts.

“Alright, cadets!” the Sergeant Major barked as the last person made it off the trucks. “You have finally made it to the Daliha region! This hub will be your home, now, so get used to it. You can see everything you need to know about from where you are: infirmary, mess hall, barracks.” He waved a hand at the medical tents, campfires, and derelict buildings each in turn. “When you are gathering to leave for a mission, you will gather here unless given specific orders otherwise, understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“I am Sergeant Major Thompson – a verifiable no-one in this camp. What that means is that important people are busy people. You will do your best to complete any task assigned, so our upper-ranks can keep their minds on the things that matter in a battlefield. I understand that most of you are replacing platoon seventeen on Colonel Grand’s detail. You will be known as 35th Platoon. 17th Platoon are in the process of packing right now, and you’ll be taking their bunks when they’ve vacated them. In the meantime, follow me and I’ll show you our various facilities.”

With a march-like thumping of their feet, the group followed Thompson as he led them around the campfires. The soldiers waiting for food ignored them for the most part, but a few scanned faces of the new arrivals. Riza found herself doing the same with the soldiers she saw – ostensibly looking for last years’ cadets who she’d recognise from her early training, but also wondering whether she’d ever run into him. He would be out here somewhere, maybe at this hub, maybe at another.

The path was hard and impacted from all of the soldiers who tramped along it each day, and it circled around the campfires, bringing them to the edge of the furthest buildings and some scattered tents. Most of the buildings looked as though they’d received a bit of damage in the fighting but, as the platoon approached, Riza could see that it was all surface-level. Perhaps damage had been restored with alchemy.

Thompson slowed as they passed the buildings, identifying them as they went: the officer’s tents, the post office, communications and command deeper into the street. “Unless you’re couriering messages you will have nothing to do with those buildings.” Some larger, more isolated tents were the bathroom block and showers, with times posted on the outside for who was allowed to use them when.

“Barracks start from here and go into the street behind this one,” Thompson said, walking them past the buildings where Riza had seen soldiers on the rooves. Snipers protecting the hub. That may be her duty sometimes. “Women are in Barracks F, men in all the others from A to P. 35th Platoon will be in K.” He stopped outside a building with a K inked in red on the door’s lintel, and wearily added, “Don’t make any excursions to F, gents – you won’t be the first to be turned away, and we don’t need dissension among the rank and file.”

There was a muttering of, “Yes sir,” and Riza couldn’t tell whether she liked the warning or not. She wasn’t looking to have anyone come and call on her, but the fact a warning needed to be given made her cautious. Still, it was good to know what the official line was, should she need it.

Thompson looked over them carefully, and his eyes paused only a moment on her before moving on. “Your commanding officer will be with you shortly, so I recommend you make good time in claiming an empty bunk and cubby. Men, in here.”

With that, the other cadets filed in, Isaac giving Riza a nod as he passed. She stood still, back straight and head high as Thompson turned to her.

The vaguely irritated look was still on his face, but his voice dropped from the bark that had to reach all the cadets together to a more normal tone as he addressed her. “You’re the sniper,” he said, more than asked.

“Yes, sir,” Riza answered.

“The captain who arrives for these guys will also be introducing you to your team, and expect to meet you here,” Thompson said. “That means if they have to be quick, you have to be quicker. Off you go, sniper.”

“Yes sir!” Riza said, and she all but ran away as she was dismissed.

\---

The streets of Ishvalan cities were made up of narrow, tall buildings built close together. It was very different from working in open spaces, where the air flow was undisturbed. Mustang pushed forward, ears listening to catch the angle of the gunfire he could hear a street over, testing the breeze against his face as he went. It was blowing back towards him, not good for avoiding self-immolation.

A pair of soldiers peeled off the platoon with him to mark the street ahead, stepping lightly over the rubble strewn through the street. His own personal security detail – what an honour. Mustang gestured ahead as he kept walking, finding the right angle.

It was another two streets down that he finally felt far enough ahead to turn down a street. At the end of the street there was a lone Amestrian soldier, ducking around the other end to return the Ishvalans’ fire. The sound of Mustang’s feet made him draw back quickly, and he swung his weapon around, thumping back against the wall with relief as Mustang neared – the blue of the Amestrian uniform revealing friend rather than foe.

“Call a retreat of anyone ahead of this point,” Mustang heard one of the men in the platoon say. “Get the Amestrians back. The Flame Alchemist will take care of this. Relay the message.”

The soldier sprung up, face alert even through exhaustion. Mustang didn’t watch as he left – he kept feeling the wind. It was soft on his face, a whisper of life in a part of the city all but dead now. It smelled like dust and smoke, but it was moving, and would take that dust somewhere else. One day it would clear the smoke from here.

He stood as Amestrian soldiers retreated past him, feeling the wind, making sure it stayed steady and predictable. A captain stopped as he saw the platoon. His eyes ran over all the men in tan overcoats, ranks obscured, and so he addressed his remark to no-one in particular: “That’s the last of us, sir. Fire as ready.”

“You’re all north of this position, then?” Mustang asked, and the man’s eyes zeroed in on him.

“Yes, sir, and at your disposal when needed.”

“I’ll let you know,” he said, straightening his gloves as he strode to the corner and ducked his head around.

A stack of sandbags were forty metres downwind, spanning the width of the street. The buildings on either side had windows in good position to make it likely there were more Ishvalans with weapons taking cover inside. Possibly gunmen on the rooves. He activated the transmutation circles on his gloves, transmuting a large patch of hydrogen that the wind instantly began dispersing in the correct direction. The Ishvalans would feel it as they breathed it, the moment before it ignited and burned their lungs, throat, mouths – and their skin, their hair, their already red eyes. But if he let them breathe it for a moment beforehand, he could set fire inside of them, and then they’d die just that bit easier, that bit faster. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much, then.

He reached a hand out and snapped his fingers, and the whole street exploded.


	3. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doing research on snipers I found out some things that massively shaped my plans for this story. After I'd written this chapter I found out those things were fairly modern tactics, and wouldn't have been used in the early 1900s. So I kept the idea and I blame the anachronism on Amestris's war-mongering ways: of course they'd come up with advanced military tactics when they're constantly in war.

Riza gripped her sidearm tightly as she followed a tan cloak down the narrow streets. Her induction into the sniper team had involved a trip to the quartermaster for the local camouflage, and a few friendly words with the smallest unit she’d ever been a part of: just two other soldiers. First Lieutenant Miller and Sergeant Major Vale. Miller was tall and broad-shouldered, with sharp eyes that flickered straight to Riza’s completely blank epaulettes. Vale was closer to Riza’s height, with dark hair that hung down too long over his forehead, like his own portable camouflage – he made Riza think of all the times in academy she’d been told to trim her fringe or put it up so she could see. She would alternate working with them on excursions through the city, or acting as one of many snipers dotted around the hub to keep it safe. They’d shaken hands grimly before starting to brief her on the reconnaissance mission they were about to undertake.

“One of our bigger platoons came back pretty shaken early this morning,” Miller told her, his tone efficient and clipped. “They went out with, what, forty-five men?”

“Yeah.”

“And came back with twelve.”

Riza clenched her jaw. That was a lot of empty seats for the ride home. A lot of families missing pieces.

“From what the men who made it back said, there were only five, maybe eight rebels they were fighting. One of them was a warrior priest. Just one.” Miller’s eyes flicked up and caught onto hers with an intensity that made Riza forget to breathe for a moment. There was a blank sort of anger hidden under there that didn’t touch the rest of his face, and he waited, either to make sure he had her attention or to impress the importance of this onto her. She knew warrior priests were good fighters, although apparently they weren’t meant to be that good. Finally, he spoke again and broke the gaze. “We’re going to go see if it’s safe to retrieve the bodies, but also to find out what it was that tipped the tide. Was this one guy just that good, or has Aerugo given the Ishvalans some new weapon we haven’t seen.”

They walked through the city at a steady pace, not moving fast enough for their footsteps to echo, but sliding around corners with bullet-holes in the walls, heads swivelling as they swapped from point to rear guard. In such a small group the roles were more fluid than in regular squads or platoons. Miller and Vale were quiet and efficient, hand-signals flashing at every corner, and Riza did her best to mimic their professionalism despite how foreign this terrain was to her.

The city was a mess, the rubble of broken buildings strewn across streets blackened by the explosions that tore them apart. As much as she knew she was walking into a battlefield, the sight of home after home a wreckage seemed a surprise. It was all empty – a ghost town that was being slowly destroyed. Alchemy had turned it all into a labyrinth, with walls bursting up out of the street, turning main roads into dead ends, blocking off alleyways and any path of escape. In those impromptu cul-de-sacs was the first hint of some memory of life that Riza saw: the dark, rusty red of the dirt between the pavers, and the bullet holes that littered those alchemised walls.

Faced even with this power, the insurgents were still fighting back. Riza’s mouth was fixed in a grim line on her face as they moved, and in the silence of stealth she drew on hope that maybe it wouldn’t be much longer, particularly with the terms of order 3066. She knew the order had changed the war – she knew that it sent alchemists in, and declared that the only way to end the war was to kill all of the Ishvalans. But if they killed all of the insurgents, all those who were fighting back, surely that would be enough. Just until they stopped fighting back.

It was slow moving, and tense with the expectation of battle in the air, so when they finally ducked into an empty house after two zigzagged kilometres, Riza felt drained. She had spent the entire trek straining to hear the enemy around corners, waiting for someone to jump out and start attacking. She was tense as she waited for something to happen. A part of her wished the hub had been closer, but in the whole journey through the city there had been nowhere nearly as defensible as the place the hub was located. It wasn’t worth making a less defensible hub closer when platoons and alchemists got vehicles to bring them most of the way in. Stealth missions wouldn’t take the chance of being noticed.

“From here on, we’re moving into areas that haven’t been totally cleared yet,” Miller said through a mouthful of dried beef. He pulled his map out and handed it to Riza. “Show me where we are, and I’ll show you where we’re aiming.”

They were sitting in the middle of the hallway, shielded from any windows, with Vale at the end so he could keep a watch on the entrance of the house. Riza took the well-wrinkled map from Miller and smoothed it onto the floor, orienting the map north the way she’d been taught to do. She quickly found the northern expanse the Amestrian hub was on and counted the blocks they’d walked, tracing the crooked path with a finger. She looked up to see what Miller thought of where her finger had landed.

Miller nodded, not looking entirely satisfied, but when Riza picked up her finger all he did was rotate the map a few degrees.

“Good,” he said, despite the alteration. He put a finger to the map to draw their upcoming route. “If we keep following this trajectory, that will bring us to the site of this morning’s battle. I anticipate that around this point here we’ll be looking for a position we can hold. Since we have the luxury of a three-person unit, you’re going to flank us while we’re in position to watch. We’ll rotate watch as necessary, depending on how long we’re there for. You have any experience flanking?”

“Just the mandatory exercises,” she said. Training had them working in groups, and it was a requirement that they would have tried every role by the end of each quarter. Riza had been a flanker precisely as many times as the minimum requirement, and kept on returning to the sniping role often through her own choice but also with the encouragement of competitive teammates who wanted to beat other teams in their training games and knew to put their best shooter up front.

“Mandatory?” Miller asked, eyebrows raised. “Training must have changed since I went through.”

“From what I could tell, it’s been the rebellion here that changed it, sir.”

He gave a grunt and chewed heavily on his rations. Riza didn’t know whether to continue talking or not, so she lapsed into silence permeated only by the crunch of her dry biscuits. Lieutenant Miller didn’t talk any more either.

When they got up to go, they left no traces that they had ever been there, stalking out into the city once again.

There was no idle talk as they picked their way through streets. Every corner was checked and every passage through an intersection was covered. Not that Riza expected conversation as they tried to evade enemy notice, but she felt the silence hanging heavy – a tension that prevented talk, instead of that comfortable silence of comradery.

By Riza’s count, they had covered almost half of the distance they needed to when Vale, acting as point, flung out a hand to get them to freeze.

Her jaw tightened. It was the one muscle she consciously allowed herself to tense as she tried to keep the rest of her muscles loose enough to move and react if necessary. She strained to hear anything from around the wall they pressed against. Vale peered around the corner, leaning back again quickly. He flicked the signals for two adults. Far away, not close. Miller signalled to retreat, and they simply turned around, Miller now taking point in the other direction so they could circle around from another angle.

The same thing happened four more times as they got closer to the location of the battle – once while Riza was on point. The Ishvalan fighters were at a distance, hunkered down by cover so that she didn’t see more than one or two faces and some tufts of hair behind rubble. It was her first view of the enemy and, even though there was no engagement, the adrenaline flew through her system as they turned and tried another route.

The houses started petering out a bit – the streets were wider, the rubble was rarer, and the ample cover they had in those wide, ruined streets was dispersed. Riza watched the other soldiers’ gait change as their level of care and alertness increased an extra notch. She wondered whether she looked as competent as they did, clutching her sidearm nervously and wishing she was hidden away in a building so she could set up her rifle. The memory stirred of sitting in the truck, considering the job of the platoon around her, and she suddenly didn’t feel so removed from all the action.

There finally came a time when they chose a building to set up in. It was no taller than any other building, and still about one hundred metres away from the battle site, as far as the map told them. They didn’t even have a clear view of where the battle had taken place.

“It’s been a busy area. We’ll inch forwards one building at a time if we need to,” Miller said. Once they had observed long enough to know what they were stepping into, that was.

As Miller and Vale made themselves comfortable on the second floor, Riza ducked under windows to explore the materials available to her in the house. It was small and fairly neat, with the main room and a kitchen downstairs, and two rooms on a second floor. The floors hadn’t been swept in a while, but the dust and dirt weren’t so thick as to show their passage. A cloth hung over the doorway in place of a door, in the Ishvalan style, the bottom a few inches short of the floor, and Riza kept her distance from it in case of observers.

Flanking was more than just watching the backs of her team to make sure no-one could sneak up on them. There was also a measure of creating traps – something that would alert you to the enemy before you even saw them, or that drew their attention somewhere else.

There was hardly any food left in the kitchen – it may have been raided already by the insurgents who stayed when the civilians fled, or by scavengers who picked through other peoples’ homes. Respectful scavengers, Riza noted as she eyed over the unmolested chairs and books. It wouldn’t do for her to scatter furniture and make the path complicated for any insurgents – it would just make it hard for her comrades as well. She ended up taking the last of the food from the storage closet and scattering the dried beans in a path across the floor, so that it looked like they spilled when someone tried to take them. Anyone who tried to come up to the second floor would crunch the beans under their feet as a warning, or if they really stopped long enough to clear the way Riza could pick them off from above. Trap in place, she made herself as comfortable as she could on the second floor overlooking the front room, and waited.

By the time Vale came to swap places with her, Riza knew that there were precisely four-hundred and twenty-three beans on the floor. He took in the sight of the rudimentary trap below them without any expression on his face, and Riza felt her neck heating with embarrassment. Maybe it was too obvious or basic. He didn’t say anything, only ushering her to the room where Miller was set up. All she could do was leave him to his own devices, to fix or leave her trap as he pleased.

Miller was prone by the window in the next room, his eye hovering at the scope of his rifle. He jerked a thumb at the space next to him. “Set up just here, cadet.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was with a sense of relief that Riza swapped from her sidearm, a Browning 1903 that was quite sufficient, thank you, to her Enfield rifle. The rifle was her centre of gravity all through her training – a talisman that lent weight to the path she was walking. She knew that she was going to have to kill people, but the distance the rifle gave her was a protection. She didn’t have to fight for her life in close combat (except that as a skilled combatant, the enemy would seek her if they could), and she wouldn’t get blood on her hands (physically, anyway). This way, instead of fighting for her own life, she could truly fight to protect others.

“You any good?” Miller asked, the question popping out like he had almost not asked it and let the thought pass by.

“Yes, sir,” Riza replied as she attached her scope.

He gave her a look. “And not shy about it.”

A part of Riza recoiled at that. She’d spent long hours practicing in the range to get to where she was. It wasn’t in her to talk herself up, especially not in a professional context, but here was a soldier who had been on the field for who knows how long, who had already had to make the shot, not just on targets but on live people. A soldier who had killed wouldn’t take her shots at targets and clay pigeons seriously.

“They considered me good enough to train me as a sniper, sir,” she said, as a means of making her claim both smaller and more substantial.

It seemed enough, because he nodded and left it at that. As Riza imitated Miller’s position, he started pointing out the places he and Vale had decided were of note: three buildings ahead which could act as the next sniper nest as they got closer to the battlefield. The one directly ahead of them would be easiest to get to without revealing themselves, but seemed to have a building close on its other side, which would block any view. To the left, with a gap of thirty metres between buildings, there was a one-storey building which didn’t seem to have anything built on the other side. It was a low vantage point, but it was unblocked. To the right, across the road, there was a two-storey building that would have a clear view of the site, since the road travelled right down past it and kept the view clear. The road also presented a wide-open space where they would be visible.

“How would you rate our prospects?” Miller asked.

Riza looked over them, hidden as much as she could be behind the ledge of the window. “Any movement?”

“None.”

She weighed up the options, going over the information they had. “I’d want to know what was beyond the building straight ahead. Does it block our view completely, or might it act as a bit of cover?”

“So you’d go straight ahead?”

They could end up there – if there were windows with a good line of sight, the other building covering the house could provide protection with the extra layers of walls to duck behind when necessary, and the shadow it cast further masking their movements. Which made it highly likely that if the enemy were present, they could be sheltering there, using the cover already. Going to the building straight ahead could put them closer to the enemy without the information to be prepared for a fight. Going to either of the buildings to the side would have them walking out in the open, and possibly in the enemy’s line of sight.

“Can we move to an angle where we can see the far building?” Riza finally asked, realising they really needed more information before they moved. “None of those three buildings, maybe, but the one to our left next door?”

There was still a gap to traverse, crossing to the house next to them, but the angle any hidden enemies would have on them was narrower. They could get a view on the path ahead before they moved either into the house straight ahead or on its left.

Miller nodded. “Good. That’s what Vale and I were tossing around. Let’s move on.”

\---

Even after the flames disappeared, the cell carried the heat of a furnace in its stone walls. Mustang lowered his hand, his vision dancing with the afterimage of fire. He blinked heavily to try to clear his eyes, and caught sight of the leaking sockets of the skull on the other side of the room. The afterimage of flames danced over it, giving him a weird sort of inverse tunnel-vision that made it hard to see the things directly in front of him. Even as he tried to watch the skull, it disappeared before him in the flames.

His peripheral vision picked up movement as a face appeared at the grille on the door, and a muffled voice said away from the window, “Yep, down to the bone – we can’t pick it up in one piece, so you’ll have to bring Knox here.”

Mustang wiped his face, a feeling too sticky just to be sweat, although his shirt was soaked with that. He was dripping with sweat, and the room was humid with vaporised fat and flesh that clung to his skin. For all he knew, he could have been crying as well – his face was wet enough for it, but he just felt numb inside. He briefly wondered how many people he was wearing today, then threw that thought away.

The afterimage had finally dulled down by the time footsteps approached and the door opened. Dr Knox hesitated at the entrance, his heavy apron and elbow-length gloves not enough to protect him from the sight of the last of the tender flesh dripping off the corpse on the other side of the room. He jerked as Mustang finally moved, and two pairs of eyes filled with horror met for a second before looking away, Mustang pushing past him to leave the room.

A hand clapped on Mustang’s shoulder in the antechamber. “Good work, Flame. Take a short break and we’ll get on to the next one. Do you need some water? Must be hot in there.”

Mustang accepted the water with something like thanks, and drank the entire cup in one gulp. When he set it down, he looked at the ring of grease his lips had left against the rim, the ghost of a man who had died in that cell.


	4. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story deals over and over with the mindset of these soldiers while at war. We know the story behind Amestris: that it was created in order to sacrifice its people. These soldiers have been fed lines to make what they’re doing seem honourable, when they massacre those in front of them. I’ve come to realise that a big part of what I’m doing here is writing soldiers explaining to themselves why their participation in these horrific acts are acceptable, and I want to make it clear that I do not think Amestris’ wars were necessary or acceptable. These are flawed people trying to come to grips with the horror of what they’re experiencing, and reconcile that with their ideals.

They moved once to find their path, and once again to finally get forward into a place where they could see the battlefield, as small as it was. When there was nothing left in the way, it really wasn’t that far to the nearest fallen soldier. Riza could make out the pattern on the bottom of his boots – the same grooves and bumps as in the bottom of her standard military boots. He was just one among almost two-score fallen men. Her eyes travelled slowly over the men there, the occasional one fallen in such a way that she could see his face, a glazed over pair of eyes catching her attention for that beat longer than the rest. Any one of them could jump up to his feet just now, laughing at having played dead so well. The red stains soaking into their uniforms and the dirt beneath them told a different story.

They were a weird sort of horror, this death hovering so close. It could be her. In a day, an hour, a month. Riza couldn’t tell whether she needed to stare at them until her staring was done, or avoid looking at them to move back to her job. Her attention was wrested away by Miller setting up his position, and she did what she could to ignore the fallen men. The sniper team was here to see if it was safe to collect these men for an honourable burial – staring at them was equivalent to letting them rot here in the desert air.

Instead, she did what she could to think methodically about it. There looked to be some last-minute fortifications on the far side, rocks and rubble piled up into walls, poorly placed sandbags. They were either abandoned or hiding their residents very well. On the near side of the fortifications were the scattered corpses of the Amestrian soldiers. Not one Ishvalan lay among them.

“The report we got said there were rebel casualties – assumed dead, but–” Miller looked out into the field and shrugged “–you can’t assume anything. Any rebels we got are either off licking their wounds now, or have been buried. The living may have run off to avoid our collection team, but who knows what nasty surprises they’ve left behind.”

They were finally able to get eyes on the obscured building – a tall, square structure with no windows on the sides they could see. The door must have been on the other side.

“I don’t like that,” was all Miller said.

They watched for movement, counting bodies and – in a few cases – body parts. Miller scanned for traps, listing a few that they’d come across before. Ishvalans hiding among Amestrian dead and attacking soldiers who came to collect the bodies. Discarded equipment that was rigged to explode when handled. Rations that were poisoned. Riza thought of the beans she’d handled in creating her own trap, and decided it wasn’t wise to rely too much on the things left behind.

There was nothing immediate that came to Miller’s attention, so he turned back to the building, and confidently said, “If there’s a trap waiting for us, that’s where it is.”

When Miller went to flank and sent Vale in, the Sergeant Major regarded it with immediate suspicion.

“Storehouse. They build ‘em with a window over the door,” he said in a low, gravelly voice. “Perfect sniper spot – you can watch your own back that way – if you’re the first one in, that is.”

One sniper trained on the storehouse, and the other sweeping the area, they watched closely with no event as the sun sank closer to the horizon. Riza scanned the bodies of the men restlessly, looking at the exposed hair and skin to try to identify any hidden Ishvalans, but of those she could see properly, all were Amestrians. Vale mentioned no change in the storehouse. If there were Ishvalans in there, they were just as determined as the Amestrians to wait and see what would happen next.

“They could have rigged up the storehouse with some sort of explosives,” he admitted. “It’s the most obvious defensible building, and, if it hasn’t been sacked already, there’ll be food there.”

Food, not for the Amestrians to take and use, Riza realised – it could have been poisoned and left for them intentionally, so it was too much to risk. No, the Amestrian tactic would be to destroy the food supply. They’d been taught it was a necessary evil of war. Without food, the enemy was weak in battle; they didn’t have the energy to fight so victory was easier for Amestrian forces. The alternative for a starving army was to divert resources from buying weapons into buying food, or to take food from its own population. The former option would weaken them, and the latter would create strife between civilians and fighters as the fighters became more oppressive of their own people. Civilians would defect, and as civilians turned to Amestris, the fighters would become isolated from their people, numbers of their recruits would lower, and their resources would dwindle until they finally surrendered or died.

Except that this was Ishval, and each step the Amestrian army took forward was another step further onto the holy land of the people. They wouldn’t leave it so easily. Riza couldn’t comprehend why a single piece of land was more important than their lives, but she knew that an Ishvalan surrender of their land was tantamount to a surrender of their faith – and ideas, hopes, faiths could be harder to let go of than life itself.

She looked over the Amestrian corpses, wondering what ideas they would die for. Had died for.

Peace. Unity, maybe.

The stains of blood on their uniforms showed where all of their hopes had bled out. Did death of a person kill their hope, or merely release them for someone else to pick up? Her eyes flickered over body after body, and more often than not she was able to see those dark stains. A cut. A gunshot, maybe. She frowned.

“The warrior priests – do they carry knives? Or guns?”

“Knives sometimes. No guns, although they’ll very happily turn ours against us,” Vale snorted.

Riza nodded. “That could explain it. I heard the priests fight mostly with their hands, but this looks like a lot of puncture wounds. Knives would explain it.”

Vale was silent, and when Riza looked up at him he was glaring into his scope, eyebrows drawing lower with each passing moment. A grimace spread across his face, and without saying a word or packing up his rifle, he stood up and walked out of the room.

Riza looked back to the scene, drawing out to try to keep watch on the storehouse as well. Had she irritated him, or did he see something? Maybe she wasn’t meant to keep talking. She scanned, not sure what she was looking for – movement? Did something happen at the storehouse? She felt blind as she tried to stay focussed on the field ahead of her, trying to see something he may have caught that she didn’t. Maybe he’d left for no reason.

It was a relief of sorts when voices preceded Miller’s entrance into the room, the Lieutenant’s quiet shushing and Vale’s protestations, saying, “They had a sniper in the storeroom during the fight. No secret weapon, no super-charged priest, just a sniper amplifying the whole situation.”

“Stay out there,” Miller said from inside the room. “No, go flank. I need to see this myself.”

As Miller set down beside her and took hold of Vale’s rifle, muttering to himself about trajectories and traps, Riza was already looking back at the dead soldiers. The sun was sinking lower, casting an orangey-red light over the scene and making it harder to differentiate darker patches of uniform because of blood or because of shadow. She tried to look through the eyes of memory to recall which patches were which, and she became more certain that they were gunshots, neat and precise, instead of jagged knife wounds. They’d fallen in such a way that Vale could be right – they could have come from a window just around the corner of that storehouse.

“There was a sniper,” Miller muttered. “Or they very much want us to believe there was.”

And there was another option. They were here looking for traps, after all. Riza found herself trying to see if the bodies had been moved from where they fell, but the distance and the harsh orange of the setting sun made it difficult to see any sort of detail. She found herself examining not just the evidence, but her own thinking about it, and began to wonder if all sniper work required as much doubling back on itself. The intentional paranoia must be required in a warzone, but it felt like endless looping.

Riza looked back at the storehouse. “How long do you keep second-guessing?”

“As long as we have the time or until we have proof.” Miller paused and gave a humourless laugh. “Or until some general or colonel makes an order you can’t contradict.”

Riza shifted uncomfortably. The chain of command was integral to the whole military structure – questioning that was the difference between a strong, efficient army, and one that was falling apart at the seams.

Miller’s frustration certainly came from being one of the people who was privy to front-lines intelligence, and so to an extent he would see a larger part of that bigger picture – but he couldn’t possibly see it all, and so of course there would be orders he disagreed with sometimes. There would be for Riza, in the future. She would still need to play her part and obey, so that the battle could proceed smoothly and the soldiers relying on her would be protected.

Right now, for example, whoever came to collect the bodies of these soldiers was relying on this small sniper team to have made sure the area was safe for them first.

The sun sank low before anything changed, the orange light becoming the dim blue that preceded actual night, and the air grew cold around them. Riza pulled her dust coat around her as they waited and watched, occupying themselves by determining the difference between the information they had and the assumptions they’d made from it. Instead of returning to flank, Miller told Riza relieve Vale, so Vale could regain possession of his rifle. It must have been colder out there, by himself. Riza was packing up her own rifle in the dark of their nest when Miller twitched.

“Cadet. That’s it,” he said in a voice just short of a hiss. “That’s our proof.”

Looking up from the kit she was rolling her scope into, Riza saw the vaguest, faintest hint of light on the side of the storehouse, straining out of a crack in the masonry. Beyond the storehouse there was nothing: the side the window was on must have been covered up so that light wouldn’t come out, but this small crack was betraying its occupant.

Miller sat frozen, eyes transfixed by that tiny sliver of light. “Finish packing up and go get Vale. When he’s done, we’re headed back to camp to report. We have enough.”

The return to camp took much longer than the trip out. There was a sense of feeling invisible in the cloak of the night, and yet every gently placed footfall was deafening. Miller picked a path back that took them through the clearest streets they had encountered so that they didn’t have to climb over as much rubble as went. When they broke into the clearing between the city and the encampment, Riza’s tense, tired legs rejoiced.

They approached the perimeter not quite straight on, but slightly to the west where there must have been an entry somewhere between buildings and fortifications.

“Who’s there?” a voice called into the night.

Riza’s heart thumped loudly in her ears – she couldn’t even see the guard, but the direction of his voice placed him along one of the walls encased in shadow.

“Sniper team five back from mission,” Miller reported. “First Lieutenant Kurt Miller.”

“Sergeant Major Oscar Vale.”

“Cadet Riza Hawkeye.”

“Ready to report to Brigadier General Fessler.”

“Confirmed. Move on.”

The camp was still bustling and thriving, even past dark. The campfires where food had been served earlier in the day were still active, flickering and throwing light on the soldiers gathered around. Riza was a little surprised to see the fires, but the half-ring of buildings the camp used for barracks and more stood between the camp and the city, blocking the vast majority of the light from the Ishvalans. An Ishvalan sniper would have a hard time using that light to find a target when their view was blocked by their own buildings – although, she couldn’t say she felt entirely safe as she drifted through the edge of the light. Being visible was asking for a bullet.

They zigzagged past campfires and officers’ tents until finally they came to the edge of the buildings where the command centre was housed. Miller had Riza and Vale wait outside while he went in to report, telling them – or most likely, telling Riza – that they needed to be nearby in case they were wanted for further information. When he emerged fifteen minutes later, he shook his head.

“Fessler’s happy with that. They’ll send the recovery squad in with a state alchemist and that’ll be that.”

An alchemist to deal with a sniper. “How’s that?” Riza asked.

Miller shrugged. “They’ll probably get someone who can bring the building down on whoever’s inside. They never have to step into his line of sight, that way.”

\---

Mustang huddled close to the campfire with his bowl of slop. His back felt the chill of the desert evening, heat dissipating into nothing, while his hands sought reprieve in the warmth before him. The entire day, he created flames, and yet at night he needed them. Safe, flickering, warming fire. As much as he tried to sit upwind, out of the smoke, the smell was a comfort. Woodsmoke. Beautiful. And the slop he held had tiny chunks of meat in it, but all cooked in the slop (soup?), so he hadn’t had to smell it roasting – a reprieve he was grateful for. Still he stared at it and wondered what it came from. Goat, maybe. Would he recognise the flavour of humans, if they used the flesh he roasted for them? No, there wasn’t enough uncharred flesh left for something like this. Must be goat.

A hand clapped down on his shoulder in time to distract him from his stomach rolling, drawing him back to the campfire and the hum of conversation between the soldiers around it.

“Major Mustang,” a voice rumbled, and Alex Armstrong stepped over the log that served as Mustang’s seat to join him.

Mustang took in the other man’s weary eyes. “Major Armstrong. I hear they’ve had you pulling long shifts in the western district lately.”

Armstrong raised those weary eyes to the embers floating above the fire. “And I hear you’ve had half-days in the field.”

The bowl was heavy in Mustang’s hand as he looked away. The other man hadn’t meant the comment harshly, but neither had Mustang. He raised his spoon in a feeble gesture. “With days like these, what do we have to look forward to, then?”

The fire flickered hungrily before them, light and shadows dancing together. There was no safe talk in war. Mustang had heard infantry talking proudly about shooting Ishvalans, steeling themselves with brave words, but there was none of that between alchemists. The balance of danger was all too wrong to glory in the lives taken, because you couldn’t fool yourself into thinking it was either you or him when you were killing dozens at a time – when you killed non-combatants as easily as you killed the man with the gun pointed at you – or when you set fire to a person in chains because someone with a coat and clipboard wanted to find out how hurt someone could be and still be brought back from the brink of death.

Armstrong’s foot shuffled, and Mustang wondered if he regretted joining him there. There must be something that two men could talk about, even while they tried to avoid their own personal shame.

“I heard you have a sister in the military,” he ventured.

Armstrong shifted, a slight relaxing of his hands around his own bowl of slop. “Olivier. She’s leading a battalion somewhere to the east of us.”

Mustang blinked. “A lieutenant colonel?”

“Oh, yes, the Armstrong family has strong military connections,” he said, with the grace to look somewhat embarrassed. A soldier who could buy their commission was always in better standing than one who had to work their way up the ranks. “But my mother writes that she is doing quite well – Olivier did always like to play at battle. Perhaps she’ll be promoted before I meet her again.”

“Paving the way for other women in the army, eh?”

“She’s inspiring for all soldiers.” Armstrong smiled, his back straightening for a moment before he slumped back down. “I’ve always looked up to her – there’s something about her courage and determination that spurred me on when we were children.”

Mustang considered his own family: a foster mother and three sisters. For him of all people to imply that a woman could only be inspiring to other women was ridiculous. He shook his head at himself. “Is that why you became a soldier?”

“Yes. I suppose it is. Without her, I would merely be a scholar, studying alchemy for my own interest. She was the one who made me want to put it to use.” Armstrong stared out into the night. “Is this really what I wanted to use it for?”

The idea that any alchemist could have joined, expecting Ishval – wanting _this_ – went beyond Mustang’s comprehension. The older alchemists like Comanche and Grand, who had been in the military for much longer, knew something of what they were stepping into because they had been there before. They had upheld law in the streets of Amestris, using their alchemy as a controlled weapon to apprehend suspects. They had been deployed briefly to border skirmishes with Aerugo and Creta, and knew what it was to transmute in battle. But did they know what a full-out massacre would be like? Did they come here ready to kill innocents? He couldn’t comprehend that.

“Amestris has two militaries:” Mustang found himself saying slowly, “the one at war, who _protects_ by any means necessary, and the one at peace, who governs and nurtures its people. Maybe you simply wanted to have one without the other.”

The wood in the fire crackled, spitting up fresh embers, and the men on the other side of the fire laughed at something one of them had said. Armstrong didn’t say anything, which was just as well, because Mustang wasn’t listening. He was feeling the heaviness in his chest and wondering whether what he had just said was for Armstrong or for himself.


	5. Chapter Four

When Riza visited the women’s barracks earlier in the day she had not taken the time to look around the building. It was a simple operation: put your pack somewhere unobtrusive, and go find your commander. Then when she’d been put on a mission: collect the pack and go. Neither time had she looked beyond the lower floor of the barracks, so she wasn’t certain what to expect when she arrived in the evening, and wasn’t sure whether she’d even have light to see.

It turned out that the lower floor was lit by a dim lightbulb – windows facing the city were blocked up with cloth that would keep the light from attracting attention – and the light coming down the stairs told her there was one up there as well.

When she arrived, four of the barracks’ inhabitants were there, mingling downstairs in various states of uniform, talking, unfolding metal and canvas cots, rolling out bedrolls, rummaging through their packs, massaging their red feet.

The conversation fizzled away as she entered, and she ducked her head in some semblance of greeting. “Hello.”

“Oh! We have a new one!” said a woman with her hair in a ponytail.

“Of course they didn’t tell us,” said another, holding a bedroll. She looked around at the frames. “Do you think they gave us another cot?”

Another woman was standing in a doorway that looked like it led to the kitchen. “Have you been carrying your pack around all day? They didn’t make you do that, did they? That’s just hazing.”

“N-no, I just returned from a mission,” Riza said, somewhat overwhelmed by the presence of other women. The whole day, she’d maybe seen two at a distance, and had not realised the lack until they were suddenly the majority. Considering that every other barrack was for men, the lack of women in the field made sense – they were just out of proportion in this workplace.

A woman seated on a bed paused in massaging her feet. “When did you arrive? Did you get sent off on a mission straight away?”

“Come on in, don’t just stand in the doorway!” Ponytail said, beckoning with a friendly hand.

“Yes, just this morning,” Riza said, letting herself be chivvied in.

Ponytail looked around at the group, and introduced herself. “I’m Second Lieutenant Annika Petrova. As far as command is concerned, I’m in charge of this barracks. As far as these ladies are concerned, I’m dorm mum.” There were some muffled laughs, but Riza noticed the woman in the kitchen doorway’s eyes glaze over in a blank, humourless expression. Maybe it was because Petrova didn’t seem that much older than all of the other women there.

“Cadet Riza Hawkeye,” Riza returned. She felt the need to salute – there was so much saluting in her training – but they’d been distinctly discouraged from doing it on the battlefield, to avoid identifying superior officers to any enemy scouts or snipers.

It seemed her introduction made enough of an impact without a salute, though, because any humour that was on her barrack-mates’ faces seemed to drop into confusion or wariness. Voices spoke over one another:

“Cadet?”

“You haven’t even finished at the academy?”

“They’re sending cadets to the front lines now?”

Petrova’s face was of stunned disbelief, but she wiped it away back into a controlled mask. “Are you a specialist?”

“I’m a sniper,” Riza admitted.

Petrova relaxed and she turned back to the others. “There – see? They wanted to make the snipers into teams. We hardly want cadets on the front lines,” she said with a reassuring nod to Riza, “but she’s a specialist – we need more of those.”

Except that Riza had arrived in a truck full of cadet soldiers, all here to put their lives on the line even before their training had been completed.

“Is … this all of the women here in Ishval?” Riza ventured.

“Just about,” said that woman on the bed, at the same time as Petrova opened her mouth.

“No, of course not!” Petrova rolled her eyes at the other woman. “Here in Daliha there will be sixteen, now, including you. They’ll come in as their shifts end, or when they’ve had their food, or whatever they’re up to. It can feel quite full when everyone’s here.”

As they lost interest in Riza’s arrival, Petrova told her to have a look around the barracks and decide where she was going to set up her bed. The shower block was closed to ladies for another fifteen minutes or so, so there was no immediate rush.

When Petrova said to look around the barracks, what she had meant was to go upstairs and check the rooms up there and compare them to the beds being set up in and outside of the kitchen. The structure was similar to the houses Riza had been in earlier that day, and she was certain that its original purpose had been as housing. Despite having spent most of the day in Ishvalan houses, it wasn’t until she had to make herself at home in one that Riza realised how different they were to Amestrian houses. She looked over the rooms and found that beyond the cosmetic differences, like the shape, the materials, and the windows not having glass in them, there was little more to them than an entry and kitchen on the bottom floor, and a few upper rooms which must originally have been for sleeping. Perhaps one was a sitting room, but now it housed folded up bed frames and a few packs waiting for the return of their occupants. As the soldiers’ supplies were all centralised, the kitchen had also been deprived of its original use and now served for sleeping.

The thing that took Riza by surprise was that there were no toilets or showers at all in the barracks. She knew there were the communal tents set up for such a purpose, but unless the bathrooms in the houses had been demolished with alchemy to make more space for beds, it must just be the way of Ishvalan houses to not have one.

As she glanced through an upper room the ladies below dispersed to gather shower gear, and one walked by to the other upper room. So they didn’t all share the entryway and kitchen for their bedrooms – they were just gathered together to socialise. Riza vaguely recognised it as the behaviour in the common area of the military dorms: women empowering women in this male-dominated workplace. It seemed strange for such a thing to happen even in a warzone, but the familiarity was soothing. Maybe it was even more necessary here than in East City. The male barracks would probably have the same rooms as this one, being made out of Ishvalan houses too. Riza rolled her eyes at herself while wondering if the men congregated in the kitchen to empower one another, too.

A few women she hadn’t seen before started trailing upstairs, and Riza could hear voices disappearing outside the barracks. Off to the showers. A prickle between her shoulder blades made her pause. The tour past the showers that morning had revealed nothing more than a canvas tent, so she could only imagine at what was inside. Eastern Command had dorms and communal showers with stalls. Here in the desert, it could be anything.

The sting of needles had faded from her memory.

It felt like a betrayal of her own sense of injustice that the single most sickening moment of her life could fade away. Why was it that she could conjure up the fear, the horror – the insipid inevitability she had felt – and yet the physical pain that had brought all of those feelings on just dissipated? For eight months afterwards, if she so much as got a splinter or pricked her finger on a thistle while she was hunting in the woods, she could feel a ghost of recognition all down her back, but now the memory of pain had disappeared and left her empty – it wasn’t healed, just so frustratingly gone.

Something in her stretched back to remember it, to conjure up the radiating pain of her father jabbing her again and again with that needle, tattooing his life’s research onto her, because if she could remember the pain, then the feelings could be justified. Now all she was left with was the memory of how she tried not to tremble as her body burnt with pain and she was just so afraid. She held still while he worked because he was too unpredictable – neglectful but passionate, putting his alchemy before anything else – and she couldn’t tell how he would react if she bade him to stop. Now all she was left with were her guilt and shame.

Let the world see his alchemy for all she cared – who cared about hiding the research of a dead man! He could do nothing to her now! But to let them see how he had marked her. How he had used her, his own daughter. That was where her pride made her stop.

There was no way she could shower with other people and let them see it, alchemy or not.

Other women came into the room where Riza had stopped, and she set her pack down as her mind buzzed, giving distracted greetings to the new faces, and trying to figure out her plan to avoid notice.

“Hey Cadet, has anyone showed you how to work the showers yet?” asked one of her new roommates, a tanned woman with dark hair.

Riza was too flustered to think. “Oh, no. I was going to go in a minute.” She was. She just hadn’t figured out how.

“I’m headed there – I can show you,” said a redhead with glasses. She was already picking things out of her pack.

Riza gathered up her things just like the other woman, mechanically pulling them out, then stared at the toiletries in her hands. Still hunched over her bag, she let the soap slip softly from her fingers back into the recesses of her pack, and bundled the rest up.

It was a reconnaissance mission. She would go and find out what it all was like – whether there was any chance of hiding, how much people took notice of one another, and so on. The schedule. How long was there to shower, and was there a time when fewer people went. That’s all she was going for, and when she’d seen it all she could excuse herself to fetch her soap or not.

The redhead introduced herself as they walked, yet another name to add to the inundation that Riza had received so far this day. That’s the way it was being in a new place, with new people. She’d pick it up eventually. So long as she could remember who was the highest rank in the room, the rest of it could flow from there. At least there was no-one in a lower rank than her: she knew she had to defer to everyone.

“We’ll go to the well first – just outside the shower tent. We draw water for showers, sterilising medical tools, cooking, whatever we need water for,” the redhead told Riza. Her name was Tamsin, and she spoke in a tired tone that Riza hadn’t noticed with the women in the kitchen. “It’s a bucket shower system, so you have to be quick to wash yourself properly.”

Riza grit her teeth and nodded, thinking that she may need to donate her bucket to someone else if she had to leave.

They joined a line at the well, the missing inhabitants of the women’s barracks seemingly all before them and hauling water up with a pulley. Each woman had to get her own bucket from the stack and attach it to the line, lower it and haul it back up. Riza watched ladies as they did the work mechanically, chattering away with each other. It looked easy enough. When it came to her turn, Tamsin took her through how to attach the bucket properly so she didn’t lose it at the bottom of the well. Hoisting it up brought to her attention muscled that had already been tense from the day stepping through a broken city, and she grunted as they twinged with each pull.

Tamsin laughed as they carried their buckets off to the showers. “You’ve been doing physical activity all day, of course you’re tired.” She jerked her head at the women who had been before them, now lining up at the shower tent. “Most of them have been sitting, looking at maps or talking through coms, and that’s about it. I think we have three – you’d make it four – women in active combat roles. We have some mechanics, and I’m on one of the medical teams along with a few others, but just under half of the barracks are in communications.”

Remembering Petrova’s light-hearted banter and its humourless reception from the woman standing in the kitchen, a schism appeared in Riza’s perception of the barracks. “Do the different groups get along?”

“For the most part,” Tamsin said. Her mouth twitched in a guilty smile. “So long as no-one undermines anyone else’s role.”

As they joined the line for the showers, Tamsin pointed out where the schedule was and held Riza’s place while she investigated. It was just a typed sheet of paper in a clear plastic folder that had been attached to the outside of the tent. The day was divided into half-hour segments except for a larger period in the middle of the day for cleaning. Each half hour had specific barracks attached to it – F had two slots, this one in the evening, and another in the mid-morning, when it was unlikely she’d have the time, if days like today were standard. But someone needed to guard the camp through the night, to work the medical tents or man the comms. She wouldn’t be able to use it regularly to avoid the crowd, but if she was unable to shower under any other circumstances, she could put her hand up for night shifts on watch.

A burst of masculine voices came out of the tent as the flap was thrown back, and Riza scurried to Tamsin amid the flurry of activity that was a handful of male soldiers dashing out, their uniforms in various states of disarray. A nova of droplets splattered over the first few women as one man shook his wet hair, and yells followed after him as he ran past the line of women, grinning.

A fully uniformed soldier Riza hadn’t noticed before was talking with one of the women at the head of the line, passing over a pocket watch as she made herself comfortable on a stool.

Tamsin noticed Riza looking and said, “Lilah will make sure the soldiers won’t try to- I mean, the male soldiers – won’t try to sneak in while we’re in there. The men have someone at the door, too, but that’s more to make sure they aren’t holding up the next barrack’s turn.”

‘Door’ was a strong word for the flap that covered the entrance, but Riza nodded, hyper-aware of the feeling of her shirt against her back. She shuffled her feet, anxious to see what it was like in there, and leave. She was running under the assumption that she would just have to go.

Finally, the line started moving, women picking up their buckets and surging into the shower tent, and Riza’s breath caught in her chest. There was no point coming this far and leaving before she knew what she was in for. Her muscles ached, and she was covered in dust she’d kicked up as they walked, and she needed a shower – she just didn’t want to think about how to manage one.

But then there she was, inside the tent and staring at walls of packed dirt that separated each of the twenty bucket showerheads into separate stalls – alchemised walls that had been built only up to shoulder height, which was not nearly high enough for her tastes, but set so that she could put her back to a wall and probably manage. With a blush over her cheeks, she realised there were no doors to speak of. They would have needed to make the whole thing with something more solid to get a functioning hinge and door working, and materials were too precious to waste on modesty. Even the thought crossed her mind, she saw one of the first women in was hanging her towel over the entrance of her shower, attaching it to the walls on either side. A narrow shield, but still workable.

“There’s so much space,” Riza said, eyeing off a shower at the far end of the tent, where she would have a whole corner to herself to keep her back hidden.

“The other barracks need it,” Tamsin pointed out. “Pick any shower you want. Don’t pour your water in until you’re ready to use it. Are you good from here?”

“Yes. Thank you,” Riza said, and she made a beeline for that corner before anyone else could take it. Soap be damned – water would be enough for today.

\---

Mustang lay back on his cot, reading his letters again. They were prematurely worn from being opened and shut many times over, and he read them slowly, meticulously, pausing often so he could try to invoke the gravelly smoker’s voice of his foster mother if she were to narrate them – or the voices of his sisters, bubbly, insistent, soft.

Home was a distant place, not just because of the physical distance, and not even because he had done such terrible things that he didn’t know if he could bring himself to face them again. There was also the fact that it had just been so long since he’d properly lived with his family. Mustang didn’t know if he’d consider himself a Central boy anymore. He’d spent years in the East now, with his alchemy training, and then at the academy. He’d rarely visited his family for more than a week at any point in almost eight years.

He missed the incidental things – jokes that cropped up because of shared experience, depth of conversation that came from having the time to explore something together, shared understandings, being able to catch Vanessa’s eye with just the right expression on his face to make her laugh. Sure, he didn’t miss being the butt of half of their jokes, or all of the babying … but maybe he did. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad to be coddled again, and fussed over by his family like a sick child.

They wrote to him almost monthly when he first got sent off to learn alchemy from Mr Hawkeye. Since arriving in Ishval, they seemed to have made some sort of rotation so one of them wrote to him each week. There was little of substance, except in the Madame’s letters, where she hinted at political scandal down every street in Central. Or more precisely, in each booth at her bar. He stifled a weary snort as he once again read her suggestion that the higher ranks in the military were too full of old men, and they could do with fresh blood. Whether that was for the sake of her girls buttering up the old men, or her maternal ambition for him, he couldn’t totally tell.

She loved to spark his ambition. It was her way of saying she cared. “Get out of there alive, Roy-boy, and liven this place up.”

He found it funny in its own way, and once he would have toyed with the thought of a life-long military career, but he no longer wanted to be a general. Ishval had sucked the optimism out of him, and all he could do was keep taking steps forwards. Maybe when it was all over he’d leave the military – become an alchemy teacher hidden in a little town on the edge of nowhere. He’d have his pupils, maybe marry some country girl who knew nothing about Ishval and its horrors, and throw away flame alchemy forever.

The thought unsettled him, and he pushed away the memory of red ink on pale skin.

The country life. Tall trees and fresh air, dirt lanes with wooden houses. And freshly picked apples, grass as high as his knees, wildflowers that were really just untended weeds. Holes in the veranda roof that leaked rain into buckets below. No, it was all another naïve dream – the shattered illusion of peace that was all a lie anyway. Even when he’d had that, it had all been a farce. A thin veil over a man who would tattoo his own daughter rather than write his research down or let it die with him.

A pained hiss escaped through his teeth, and he put his hands over his eyes. “ _Foolish man_ ,” he muttered, either to his teacher or to himself. Or to everyone in this hellhole - why not?

He breathed deep, and brought his foster mother’s letter back up:

_Too many old men, and all they can do is boast about the battles they’ve won, or they are winning “as we speak, my freckle-grub,” as one said to Madeline the other day. I could kiss her for how well she held her composure, but she always was good at receiving any disgusting thing as a compliment._

_Yes, we need some fresh blood, my boy. This all has the same tone, day in, day out, and Central could do with livening up. Come back soon, but in the meantime give the censors my best – I’ll store up all my bawdiest stories for them; they’ll like your letters best of all those they have to read, I’m sure._

New blood, and all he wanted to do was leave. Maybe there was no such thing as peace – only the pretence, which he couldn’t even bring himself to want anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m styling the Ishvalan lack of indoor plumbing on the ancient Roman method: public toilets were a big thing. Mostly because the desert cultures I know more about tend to be a) ancient or b) nomadic, so I am unfamiliar with desert cultures having indoor plumbing except in a properly modern and/or rich setting. From what I can tell, Ishval had some trade but wasn’t particularly affluent, so they could have had it but I just can’t accurately tell. I have no idea what desert cultures were like in the early 20th century – please forgive me if I’m wildly inaccurate


	6. Chapter Five

Riza didn’t know what to expect for the next day – her first day in Daliha she’d just had to adopt a take-it-as-it-comes attitude – and so she packed everything into her bag in case she needed it in a rush, then went off to report for duty. It turned out she needn’t have packed, because they were accompanying an alchemist and his squad, and alchemists were never left out in the field overnight. It wasn’t worth the risk of losing one of them.

They were briefed on the mission in a huddle with the 9th Platoon, Major Comanche’s protective platoon. It wasn’t to destroy the storehouse Lieutenant Miller’s team had been watching the other day – the group who were doing that had left as the sun was rising, while Riza was still discovering what passed for breakfast in camp. Instead, they were going as a group to push forward into uncharted territory.

Sections of the city had been untouched; the long stretch of the military’s arm still hadn’t reached beyond the northern suburbs yet, because as Amestris marched forwards, greater pushback came from strongholds dotted through the city. Ishvalans were like a crowd being pushed back into itself – there was only so far people could retreat before the strength of those behind them joined in pushing back. It was time to clear out new swathes of the city.

The platoon would split – two squads sticking with Comanche, one with the trucks, and the fourth clearing the way ahead of the snipers so they could secure a good position early. It would be a rush to get in and get hands bloody.

The briefing sent an uncertain flicker through Riza, as she tried to repeat to herself that when they killed the rebels the rest may still surrender peacefully and be allowed to go. No face around her showed any uncertainty. These were soldiers who had been here for months already, and who had been fighting for that whole time. She wondered how many of them had killed civilians already.

“There’s been talk of creating a second encampment so we can work towards encircling the city,” Miller informed Riza in their truck on the way. “That either means dividing the battalions up, which will make the camps harder to defend and vulnerable to attack – or diverting troops from Creta and Aerugo.” He held her gaze in a meaningful glare. “Fessler does not like sharing glory.”

This time, since it wasn’t a stealth mission, they were transported in trucks along with the platoon designated to protect Major Comanche. It was crowded, soldiers pressed shoulder to shoulder. Not unlike the truck yesterday that had delivered Riza into Ishval.

Miller continued. “If we don’t kill significant numbers of Ishvalans before Fessler tries to split camps, we’ll be in significant danger of an attack from them that could breach our perimeter. Today you’re going to shoot Ishvalans. Put a priority on gunners, warrior priests, as many fighters as you can. Whoever you see who isn’t one of ours, sure, it’s all useful. But most importantly, you will shoot their messengers and anyone who might be operating comms. Give them no chance for reinforcements.”

Riza breathed in under the onslaught and nodded. Today. This would be when she killed someone to help protect Amestris.

The moment the truck stopped, soldiers jumped up with their guns in their hands. Riza shuffled along with the group as they poured out of the truck, and a yell for the snipers brought Vale pushing to the fore. Riza was jumping onto the cobblestone street as Vale let out his first shot. He was bracing on a knee, and a moment later he let off another shot and swore loudly. She swung around to see what they were facing only to see someone running – someone thin, with dark skin and short, white hair. A body lay on the ground, the victim of Vale’s first shot, and a third gunshot rang out, finally downing the one running away.

As the sound of the shot faded away from her ears, movement at the end of the street registered. A lot of movement, and the distant sound of screams. The platoon was running towards it all, Comanche’s thick west-highlands accent leading them in the charge, and Riza was swept up with them, trying to stay close to Miller and Vale.

As they ran past the bodies, a soldier at the front of the platoon paused to put an extra shot into each of their heads, and brain matter splattered over the stones behind them. Vale had shot them in the chest – the standard sniper technique to increase chances of hitting vitals and downing the target. If he’d had his scope attached, and longer to aim, maybe he would have gone for the head, but the chest was the safest way. It had certainly incapacitated them at least, maybe leaving them there gargling in their own blood. Riza averted her eyes from the gore. With a shot each to the head, any chance they were still alive was eliminated.

Gunfire burst out in front of them, and there was a yell among the Amestrian soldiers.

“9th Delta! Left up!” Miller roared, and Riza put on a burst of speed, heart in her throat as she realised someone was shooting at them. Squad Delta and the sniper team ran forward to meet an alleyway on their left that took them out of the firing gunman’s field of vision.

The buildings here were built close together, almost up against each other, and the alleyway was narrow. With two men ducking around the corner to lay down bursts of cover fire, the others poured into the open doorway of the building, soldiers checking rooms were clear with a speed that Riza had to push to keep up with. They stomped up the stairs without a single measure of stealth, but now was not the time for stealth.

Two quick shots came from a soldier on the second floor. “Clear!”

A moment later it happened again in the next room – those quick shots, and the call of “clear” – but Riza was already heading up above the second floor, following Vale to the roof.

Gunfire was being exchanged, echoing up from below them and at the opening of the street up ahead. Vale huddled up to the short wall that ran around the edge of the roof, seeking a target in the exchange down on the street.

A soldier darted past Riza, putting a foot up to the ledge and stepping across to the next roof with an easy stride. Another followed. She let out a breath in a quick puff and joined them, grateful for how close the houses were – it was barely a leap, even with her shorter legs. Miller had described the technique they used in these areas as leapfrogging – they’d just keep moving closer and closer, over the buildings, and let the squad make sure no-one was coming up the stairs behind them.

They leapt over another house, and another, then something rattled against the wall to their side and the soldier at the front jerked to a stop so quickly he tripped back, the soldier behind him dropping to the ground. Riza dropped too, the reaction rushing like a wave back through everyone following them.

There was shouting – the soldiers in front of her were moving, crawling as low to the roof as they could. She couldn’t see any blood – and they were moving fairly normally - so she didn’t think either had been shot. They were just reacting to bullets coming so close.

“Gunman on the roof!” Miller called from behind. “Vale!”

Riza crawled towards the wall, scuffling along as quickly as she could to find a spot she may be able to shoot from. Her heart hammered against her chest.

Only a moment later, Miller was shouting again – “Gunman down! Keep moving, Delta!”

She hadn’t heard Vale – he was too far away for her to hear his voice reporting, and there was so much gunfire that she hadn’t been able to differentiate his shot among all the others. Death just came that easily. She pushed up, and kept running.

A spray of gunfire peppered the buildings on the other side of the street, and a triumphant laugh burst out – Comanche’s voice. Riza glanced over as she ran to see that he was there among the rebels where the street opened out, about thirty metres ahead, a spinning tornado of blades. He was there already, taking out the Ishvalan gunners who had been firing on the soldiers down at the trucks.

They leapt over those few last houses, and as Riza reached the end of the line she could see that it opened out into some sort of market ahead – a town square filled with carts of produce, a fountain in the middle, people running, more Ishvalans with guns arriving and trying to shoot at Comanche where he danced with his sword.

She let the soldiers fall back to clear the house below her and brought her gun to the ledge, scanning the rebels for the most dangerous looking weapons. A mini-gun was arriving from a lane to the east, the man carrying it almost staggering under the weight. He wasn’t far away. She lined up the shot, the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

He fell instantly, the heavy gun thumping to the ground underneath him. Another rebel leapt forward – maybe to check his friend, probably to retrieve the gun. She pulled the trigger again and he fell, too, blood pouring from where his ear used to be.

Someone was throwing furniture out of windows at the far end of the square, and a few men were rushing around to drag them into some sort of barricade. She could see men among them wielding guns. An enemy with a defence could be more dangerous. She lined up the shots and took them – one, two, three. She’d seen a fourth man among them, but he had dropped behind an upturned table as he saw his comrades fall.

A glance back at the mini-gun showed her it was still there, and it looked like more Ishvalans may be coming to get it. It was too valuable for them to leave, and too risky for her to ignore.

She ejected her clip of hollow points, and jumped at a sound behind her – a glance told her it was just Miller setting up to face the other side of the square. A quick rummage in her bag found a clip of precious armour-piercing rounds. Even as she put them in, someone was rolling the first two men off the mini-gun to pick it up.

They could either bring it in to join the fight, or run away with it. Either way, it was too dangerous. She lined the shot up, pausing only for the time it took to let a breath out, and squeezed the trigger. The impact tore the mini-gun out of his hands, ripping into the mechanism. She shot into the gun again for good measure as the Ishvalan ran away, and this time she saw some debris fly up off it – something was definitely broken in there, and if he’d abandoned it then maybe no-one would come back to see if it could still work.

Comanche was flying into the marketplace, leaving a trail of destruction among the stalls as he tore through them. She’d have to make sure he was out of her way before shooting – he was moving so fast after any Ishvalans in sight that it was possible she could take him down by accident if she wasn’t paying attention. He would take care of the rebels in the square – she swapped back to her hollow points and set herself looking for reinforcements arriving, any movement out on the perimeter.

More men coming down the eastern lane. She shot one and the rest ducked into an alleyway, just as the Amestrians had under fire. When a face poked around the corner, looking for the shooter picking them off, she managed to get him right through the cheekbone. He fell, and writhed on the ground for a moment before someone behind the wall dragged him out of her sight. That was the moment that brought Riza to herself.

Through her scope, she could see the blood he’d trailed on the dirt. There were stones his clawed hands had dislodged, knocking them into a new, meaningless position, except that they were only there because he’d swiped at them in throes of pain. That she had caused. Was he dead yet, around the corner with his friends trying to stop the bleeding? Was he groaning out in agony as blood poured out of his face? Had her bullet just gotten his jaw, or did it get that essential angle to carve out some brain?

What if he lived, his face permanently caved in by the damage she had done?

Movement in the window. Riza gasped in reflex, but whoever it was, they didn’t stop to look out. Either the rebels had gone inside the house – with or without the man she had shot – or the people in there were moving to help them.

There was a grunt from Miller behind her at she didn’t know what – maybe a missed target, maybe her – and so she made herself take a long, deep breath and hunker down over her gun again to find the next target.

Over the course of half an hour they obliterated the market, littering it with bodies of rebels. The square was a zone of destruction, the market stalls and carts upturned, torn apart, splashed with a fresh coat of red paint. What little produce there was had been trampled underfoot. Bodies were ripped apart by Comanche’s sword or filled with bullets, and when they ran out of people in the square who had come to fight, Comanche ordered the soldiers to storm the houses ringing the square and shoot anyone they found inside. Riza watched from her rooftop, on guard for any more attackers who might come, or – as Miller reiterated tersely – the messengers who may go running to alert reinforcements.

From a distance, blood cooling, watching the soldiers march in and out of houses felt like a slaughter. That was all it was. There was no element of protection – no-one came to fight. She reasoned with herself that there could be people trying to attack them in the houses, but at this point that could really just be considered self-defence. At what point came the divide separating an act of violence made to protect oneself, or to defend one’s country?

Eventually, the houses around the market square had been cleared. A signal was given and the soldiers continued down a street on the southern side of the market, the snipers having to begin their leapfrogging journey again to keep pace.

They’d travelled almost a hundred metres past the square when an explosion burst out of the upper floor of a house. Riza was three buildings away, leaping forward, and saw a cloud pf brick and dust burst up as the roof crumbled beneath the two Delta squad soldiers leading the rooftop charge.

She skidded to a stop, the yells of the squad on the ground echoing up through the street. Miller was behind them, guarding their progress, and Vale ahead of Riza, on the building just before the explosion. His roof cracked from the force of the explosion, and Vale came skittering back as it threatened to collapse. Riza leapt into action, running forwards so that she could pull him over if the building dropped, but even as she jumped to the last roof between them, he was already climbing over the ledge to safety.

She joined him looking over at the dispersing smoke. It was a bad angle – they could barely see anything with a whole extra building between them, but cracked portions of the roof ahead made it too dangerous to advance. They couldn’t see anything of the soldiers who fell from this angle, and couldn’t see any danger ahead.

Riza turned back to the other soldiers from Delta squad running to meet them. There were some down on the ground to protect the group from below, and one over with Miller. Three came to Riza and Vale, faces taut. Those were their comrades in the dust.

“We can’t move on from here,” Vale snapped.

One of the soldiers was leaning over the edge of the roof over the street. “That wasn’t a missile, was it?”

“No, nothing external as far I could see,” Vale said, dismissively. “A grenade, maybe. Get us down from here.”

“Right.”

One of the soldiers had been standing at the top of the stairs, his gun trained down the hole. On Vale’s command, he trotted down the steps ahead of the rest of them.

The sound of sobbing came from the rooms below as he went, words turning into shrieks before gunfire cut them off. A blend of voices, young and old, and then silence.

In that moment she wanted to dig her heels in and just stay up on the roof. There was nothing down there she wanted to see. Instead she made her legs move, like giving an order to automail rather than her own responsive flesh. She kept her eyes trained forward as she went, and refused to consider her periphery.

As they exited onto the street, they were met by Comanche’s blustering tones: “- by whatever means of conniving skulduggery they can muster! Savages, the bleeding lot of them! No style at all! Aye, and what do you have to say about this? Misfire?”

He’d turned his glare not on the snipers and their protectors, but on several soldiers climbing over the wreckage of the smoky building. Riza was struck by the contrast of one soldier working to help unearth an Amestrian soldier from the collapse, right next to another who fired a killing shot into an Ishvalan who had been caught in it too, just to be sure.

“Sir! There are guns here!” responded another soldier atop the debris. “At least three assault rifles that I can see.”

“What? Dig it out! Alpha squad, get up there!”

“It’s not stable enough for everyone at once, sir!”

“Faster, then! Work faster!”

Riza clenched and unclenched her jaw as the soldiers who could climb the wreckage began hurling it off the pile. Her hands tingled, a minor tremor passing through them as the adrenaline she had been running on began to fade. The shades of faces hovered in her mind – children of the age she imagined those voices belonged to, tears streaming down their cheeks, hands held out in supplication. The face of a man whose cheekbone was shot through, breathing wet, bloody breaths. Two people shot through the chest, lying in the street, moaning, until a soldier put a bullet through their heads. This was the war she had signed up for.

No – this was war. Anywhere she fought would require her to pull the trigger to end a life, and Ishval was no different. This was what she had signed up for to protect her country. It would happen with or without her, so her part in this was simply to make each death as quick as she could. She couldn’t guarantee a kill with every hit, but she would do her best.

\---

The storehouse exploded in flames when Mustang clicked. Not the stone it was built with, but whatever was inside – grain, perhaps – lighting up and smoke billowing out of the window. There were panicked, pained screams and, one after the other, two bodies wreathed in flames hurled themselves out of the upper window. They hurtled into the ground, and before they could raise a hand to beat the flames off themselves, Mustang snapped again, drawing the screams into a crescendo until they stopped.

They said in natural fires a person would die of asphyxiation from the smoke, or from the radiant heat, before they died from the burns. It wasn’t that way with the Flame Alchemist. Perhaps it was a small mercy that he didn’t let them linger.

“Woah.”

Mustang looked sideways at the leader of the collections team. The expression on his face was something like awe. Mustang frowned.

“You can go collect our men, now,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” the other man said, in tones of reverence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I. Do. Not. Know how many bullets a sniper would have in a clip. A quick internet search tells me they don’t have to reload after every bullet like they do in some movies (apparently there a benefits to loading one bullet at a time, but, you know, not in live combat where time is vital) – but I couldn’t quickly find how many bullets they may actually have. I suspect it would be a lower number in the early 1900s than currently. So if Riza fired too many times before needing to reload, it’s purely a matter of different technology. Amestris and war, amirite? My search history full of guns and snipers and killing methods makes me look like a psycho at the moment.


	7. Chapter Six

Driving over the cobblestones did nothing to help the ache starting in Riza’s jaw. She held her mouth shut to try to keep her teeth from rattling as they bumped their way towards the smoother road home. A communal sigh of relief filled the truck when the bumping finally ceased.

“You did pretty well, cadet,” a soldier across from Riza said. He was one from Delta squad, with a sergeant’s stars on his shoulder. She thought back, and decided he was probably guarding the stairs of the building she’d been on for most of the market fight. “No messing around – bam! First time out, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“How many did you get?”

“Ahh …” she blinked furiously, her brain taking a moment to catch up with the question, as she realised Miller, on her right, had looked around with interest.

“How _did_ you go?” he asked. “Did you count?”

“I could figure it out,” Riza said. Their faces were clear enough in her memory.

The sergeant grinned. “You have to remember so you can get your kills on the board. Warrant Officer Carcano is in the lead at the moment with 120-odd, but Sergeant Major Vale might have finally caught him today.”

She looked askance at Miller, who shrugged with a wry smile. “Number of kills. I’d make it a point-system for targets of value if it was up to me, but that skews the death count, which is what the generals are really after.”

“Isn’t making a competition of it a bit macabre?”

The sergeant scoffed at her frown. “It’s war. The whole thing is macabre. You can dwell on all of that and break apart, or you can _live_.” He said it with a quirk to his grin. Riza couldn’t tell whether he was being patronising or just doing his best to stay sane in a place where any person could lose their mind.

He switched his attention to Miller. “What about you, sir? Is it worth my while protecting you?”

Miller raised an eyebrow at the cheek. “Two messengers. One of their leaders – I almost got another one, but Comanche got him first. Eleven footsoldiers.”

“Two messengers!”

“Mm. Headed south,” Miller said, with a significant look.

The building that had exploded hadn’t been that far down the southern street. They’d spent an hour or so removing rubble, unearthing the weapons cache that had quite possibly held the source of the explosion. A lot of it was damaged beyond use in the blast.

Two men from Alpha squad had been inside when the explosion went off. The two from Delta who had been on the roof didn’t fare too badly in comparison – one was partially buried in rubble, and when they dug him out there were some abrasions to see to, and his legs weren’t in great shape; the other fell through the rubble and slipped from the second floor onto the street, probably breaking his wrists in the tumble, and with a few lumps from rubble falling after him. It had taken a longer time to find the soldiers from Alpha. They’d been identified by their uniforms – one was found in pieces, and the other had his head caved in by a chunk of falling roof.

So no-one was able to confirm what started the explosion, but with the number of weapons and the addition of a few Ishvalan bodies, all appropriately sized to be combatants, it was assumed that the rebels had destroyed their weapons stash rather than letting Amestris seize it and use it against them.

The sergeant let out a whistle. “Yeah, that could have turned the tide of things for them a bit. I wouldn’t want to fight against their backup arriving with that arsenal. Or even-! The cadet here, right? Her first shot, I was just behind her. She lines up, pops it off, and I see this guy drop straight away. What was he carrying? Just a minigun. I don’t think it ever made it into the fight.”

He turned his grin back on Riza, and she felt her face go red. He would have had his own job to do, and other things to watch, so he couldn’t possibly have been following her every move, but she still felt intruded upon. She had killed people today, and he had seen it.

It happened all the time in the academy – not the killing, but cadets watching each other’s progress. With your every move benefiting or hindering the platoon or squad you trained with, they were liable to take an interest in your achievements. There was even a healthy sense of competition that drove cadets to work harder, be better, drive one another on. Perhaps this was just the same: the competition and the teamwork, now here in a real-world setting.

Now what she was being praised for wasn’t just her aim, but that she had brought someone’s death upon them. But wasn’t it his right, in a way, to take pride in her shooting? This man and his squad had protected her so that she in turn could protect Comanche and the rest of the platoon – so in a way the shots that she made, the kills now under her belt, were a form of thanks she could offer to those who protected her. Of all the kills she made that he could take pride in, that one, she supposed, was the one that she would choose, too.

A speculative look crossed Miller’s face. “You dropped a minigunner and no-one came back for the gun?”

Riza’s eyes flickered between Miller and the sergeant. The sergeant was looking at her expectantly too – he must have only seen the first shot before his own duty took his attention. That was something of a relief, at least.

“They did,” she admitted. “I had to put some AP bullets into it before they stopped coming back for it. They might be able to salvage parts of it for later–”

“Oof! Good work!”

“Not bad, cadet.”

She trailed off at the praise.

“That was right at the start, too,” the sergeant went on. “When Comanche was out front with no-one and nothing between him and the Ishvalans. If they got him, we would have been done.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Miller said, with a pointed look at Riza. The man seemed to speak more with his eyes than he did with his mouth. “What else, cadet? Did you make any other spectacular shots today? How many did you make?”

“How many ..?”

“Just kills in general.”

She took a breath and mentally braced herself as their faces flashed before her. “Eight dead.” The two over the minigun. One at the barricade that she’d been able to see. The first man down the eastern street. Three who had come out of the market square houses to join the fight, and one as they went down the southern street. “And fourteen … unknown. A few of them were probably dead, but I couldn’t see them from where they fell.”

Miller laughed, waving a hand dismissively as he leant forwards. “No-one on the charts is that honest with their points. I swear I’ve seen three soldiers all claim the same kill. If you think you shot well enough to take them out of the fight, that’s good enough for me.”

Two more who fell behind the barricade. The man who she shot through the cheekbone and had been dragged back by his friends. His friends, through the windows of the house. One standing by the fountain, who had fallen out of sight. Some using produce carts as cover. One who limped away while she was reloading. A gunman on a roof the other side of the square who fell behind the roof’s lip. Another who shot at the Amestrians from one of the houses as they moved south. His friend or brother, who ran out into the street after the first one disappeared from the window. Another through a window, who toppled back over and off a table and didn’t get up.

“Twenty, then,” she ventured. The one that ran away didn’t count. The rest were solid hits, but minus one more for good measure.

“You think?” the sergeant asked.

Riza frowned, but nodded.

He whistled. “We got us an eagle-eye over here!”

“No, no. Hawk-eye,” Miller said, and Riza heard the emphasis with a reluctance beyond words. “Eyes of a hawk, this one.”

The sergeant took it in his stride. She didn’t think he knew it was her actual name – he just knew she was the cadet sniper.

The tone had been such a balance between playful and mocking that Riza wasn’t entirely sure how to take it, but she wasn’t sure she liked it either way. Miller’s smile twisted and turned into a grimace.

“You can count your serious injuries as kills, cadet, but don’t inflate numbers beyond that. We want a reasonable estimate of enemy dead, after all.”

“Yes, sir.”

Miller raised an eyebrow. “Any retractions to make?”

“No, sir.”

He gave her an appraising look, which she forced herself to meet unflinchingly. “I’ll have to test you when we get a chance, then.”

The trucks rolled back in to camp in the early afternoon, discharging the four squads, complete with two injured Delta soldiers being helped out of the back of one truck, and the deceased Alpha soldiers carried out of the other on stretchers. A few of the soldiers who had been on the truck with the dead men looked decidedly green around the gills.

Some Ishvalans were among the soldiers. Four of them who had thrown down their guns and begged for mercy. At the time, Riza had believed the soldiers would shoot them anyway, but they’d been frisked for hidden weapons and their hands had been bound. She didn’t understand it – she’d hoped that mercy would exist even on such a place as the battlefield, but for it to be so arbitrary … Why were these combatants shown mercy, and not the civilians? Was it because they were healthy and strong? They could do menial labour in the Amestrian camp, perhaps – but Riza hadn’t seen any other Ishvalans in the camp.

“They’ll take them up to the prison-”

Riza jumped at the voice appearing by her side, but it was only the Delta sergeant. He was pointing up at the fortress Riza had seen when she came into camp. Must have seen her staring at the Ishvalans.

“-and find out if they have any information that can help us. Ambushes, incoming supplies, that sort of thing.”

They looked as though the life had been drained out of them – shoulders hanging low, faces too tired to be afraid. An officer approached, rounding them up as though they weren’t already huddled together for some sort of protection, and began moving them along.

“Do we take many prisoners?” Riza asked. She wondered how they got the information. They’d surrendered; perhaps they gave it willingly.

The sergeant grimaced. “It seems like there’s a steady supply. The top brass want all the information they can get about hidey-holes and all that.”

“And … they just tell us?”

His face fell. He looked down and sniffed. “Hey, you want a cigarette?”

His hand was already reaching for the pack in his pocket, but she waved away the offer, still staring up at him for an answer. The sergeant took one for himself, tapping it against the box before he put it into his mouth, eyes travelling back up to the great stone building and the retreating backs of the Ishvalans.

“That’s where the alchemists go when they don’t have other duties,” he eventually mumbled. “Best not to think about it too much.”

The transmuted walls in the city, riddled with bullet-holes and blood. Major Comanche’s sword that he’d not been holding before the fight began. Colonel Grand’s personal armoury that he was rumoured to deploy. All of that and a man who could light a candle at ten feet.

Riza didn’t let her gaze linger on the building. She put her head down and moved on.

\---

When he arrived for his afternoon duties, Mustang was led into the reappropriated warden’s office and greeted by a major general he’d never seen before – a man with glasses and large, staring eyes, and a wide scar curving over his bald head.

“Flame Alchemist,” the general said, in lieu of introducing himself. They never did, in this fortress, almost as though they didn’t want their name to be captured by these walls.

“Yes, sir.”

The general gestured Mustang toward a chair, and sat behind the warden’s own desk. He rested his elbows on the dark, wooden monstrosity and steepled his fingers. “You’ve been doing some excellent work, I hear.”

If they had met in another part of the camp, Mustang would have ducked his head and reluctantly received it as a comment on the war effort. There could be some honour, perhaps, out there. Here, his heart sank.

“A new angle has come to our attention that we wish for you to pursue. In the name of science, and medicine, of course.”

Never in the name of warfare. Never in the name of torture or sadism. He wondered whether his own minor suffering at carrying out the orders he was given was an experiment, too. Perhaps it was as satisfactory to the scientists as the seared flesh he provided for them.

“The power of your alchemy has grown so much in the short time you have been here. How is your precision progressing?”

“Very well, sir,” Mustang said. “I have not missed a target since I arrived.”

“A target? Yes, indeed. What if your target was not a location, but a status?”

Mustang blinked, his brown furrowing. “You’ll have to be more specific, sir.”

The general leaned back in the chair, folded hands resting against the desk. His thumbs twitched and twiddled, and Mustang tried to read his face: was that guilt in his hesitation, or simply a man trying to find his words?

“We’ve learnt … almost our fill about burnt corpses. There is more to know, I am sure, but there will be the opportunity along the way. The other opportunity we have, that has heretofore slipped by unnoticed, is the capacity of the body to heal.”

“So, you want me only to injure the Ishvalans here … so that we can treat them? Not kill them?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“Even with the extermination order, sir?”

The general held his hands up, a symbol of honesty that was supposed to engender trust. Mustang did not feel his trust doing any engendering.

“They will die,” the general said – openly. Honestly. “But first they can further our understanding of what a body can endure, if you understand me. Which burns will heal on their own, and which need medical care? How close to the brink of death can a person be, and still be saved? What can we do to that ugly scarring to help it heal naturally?”

He must have seen some of the distress Mustang felt, leaking out onto his face from behind the wall he tried to raise these days. The general paused, a reproachful look coming over him.

“People will hurt and die of burns, Flame, many years from now. Fires do not only happen in war. And here we have the opportunity to understand how to treat such an injury.” The general’s shoulders raised an infinitesimal fraction of an inch. “What you do here could save lives for years to come.”

That the man had done anything other than double down on an “I’m the one giving the orders” attitude was new to Mustang. It would be a stretch to say that he was relieved by it – he couldn’t conceive of ‘morality’ including burning someone just short of the point of death, and to find himself being ordered around someone who could hold onto such a pretence … Well, this man wasn’t the one who would be burning those people. Maybe he could fool himself from that little extra distance that his hands weren’t responsible for their blood.

Mustang understood his orders. He knew what was being asked of him, and he knew that their blood would be on his hands – and as he left the room he brushed his hands together, wiping as though to let the blood that stained them drip off and remain behind.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is about a week later than usual. My writing has slowed down because I hit the end of my stride. I made the near-fatal mistake of stopping writing after a chapter finished, without a plan for the next one, and when I came back my brain was dead. Add to that a few chores and checking in on people, and suddenly the kid is waking up and I have to stop even though I've not written anything. So it took a few days to get rolling again. Usually when I post a chapter, the next chapter is already complete and I'm starting on the next one (so I have a week to mull over a complete chapter and do editing), but this time I'm posting a week late and my next chapter is only half way through. I'm getting there. I hope you're all safe and doing well in These Trying Times.

The next day, they were assigned to guard duty on the north-eastern perimeter. It was along the road where trucks came in and out, with regular soldiers assigned to the check point to check the truck loads were what they said they were, and the drivers were still Amestrian soldiers and not Ishvalans in disguise. The road was the only thing on the landscape other than rocks.

The sniper team was supposed to be spread along the southern wall, shooting anything that moved, and if anything moved they would surely see it, because there was no cover other than a scraggly bush that didn’t have enough foliage to be effective. Instead, they were bunched up in one place, with Miller and Vale bickering about how to investigate Riza’s potential as a sniper when they were in a place completely devoid of targets.

“We pick a rock,” seemed to be Miller’s line of arguing.

Vale preferred, “I could just walk out there and put a cup at a decent distance,” which provoked the argument about whose cup was going to get shot, and what if there were any Ishvalans in a place kilometres away from where Ishvalans were too smart to bother wandering.

Riza stared out over the expanse, ears cocked in fascination at a First Lieutenant who would bother arguing with a Sergeant Major, and a Sergeant Major with the self-assurance to take that tone of outrage with his superior officer. Over whether to shoot a rock or a cup. Somehow, she got the impression that the academy took rank more seriously than the front lines, and that was a rather jarring idea.

Around the point where Vale loudly suggested that he just throw the cup and see where it lands, her eyes narrowed.

“How far would you expect a decent sniper to be able to shoot in a hurry?”

“You’re asking me? Are you not a sniper yourself, sir?”

“Humour me!”

“See that bush there? The one with the-?”

“The only bush? Oh, I know the one.”

“Right, well, that’s how far I’d expect _you_ could shoot, sir. I’d be able to chip that sticky-out bit off the boulder back there.”

“And now you think rocks are good idea!”

For a moment, she dared to look away from the vast expanse of nothing they were meant to be guarding.

“For me, yes. For you and her, the bush. If there was any way of being able to track which bit of twigs she hit. So, no.”

They weren’t even watching. They weren’t looking out at the desert plains, not at the rocks, not at the bush, not even at the wall they were using as cover. In fact, Vale wasn’t even holding his gun as he vaguely gestured out into the distance.

She’d been nursing a headache this morning. That dull ache of exhaustion from a restless night spent dreaming of fire and the bloody faces of the people she’d shot. There was a thin line that she was trying to place, which divided murder in peacetime and killing in war. Was the only difference the permission granted by the government? No, there was also an element of trying to defend one’s home, or way of life – maybe you couldn’t be considered a murderer if it was the reasonable action to protect against an attacker. Reasonable action.

Four Ishvalans had gone into the fortress. Where alchemists were when they weren’t on duty. It shouldn’t have felt foreboding – alchemy was designed to help people, after all – except what could alchemy do there? Even her father, staunch anti-militarist as he was, didn’t fulfil the alchemic ideal, but somehow he had stamped it onto her. It must have been his modus operandi.

_Alchemist, be thou for the people._

Four Ishvalans surrendered and taken to the alchemists to give their information.

With the black mood that came from running in these circles, she’d reported for duty, and when they came to the checkpoint, she didn’t know whether to be relieved that she wasn’t likely to have to shoot anyone today, or to be overcome by how little there was to do here. They didn’t even have to deal with the trucks that arrived every half hour or so, because the regular soldiers did that. Although, she did watch them fiercely, trying to judge whether they were stopping or just going to plough through – whether the driver was Amestrian, or an Ishvalan who had hijacked a vehicle to do damage to the camp. They always stopped. They were always Amestrian.

Miller and Vale slowed their argument to a distracted drawl when a truck approached, so they were still paying attention after all, but as soon as it was certain things were clear, they started back up again. For highly trained soldiers in a warzone, they didn’t seem to be taking much of this seriously at all.

“Oh, the bush is my measure, is it? Point out the twig you want shot, and I’ll shoot it. Any part.”

“No. Anything you hit, you’ll just pretend that’s what I was talking about, even if it wasn’t.”

“Alright, then, the cadet can be the judge!”

“Isn’t she the one you wanted to test in the first place?”

“Before you slighted my skills. I’ll have you know I could pick off any target you chose, if you were game enough. Cadet!”

Riza should have been expecting it, but she still jerked when Miller yelled for her. “Yes, sir?”

“Are you awake, cadet?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Are you alive, cadet?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good.” And he turned right back to Vale. “Now, you, on the other hand, might be able to get that bit of the boulder, but I’d be much more interested in seeing you shoot a hole in your own cup. How far do you actually think you could throw it?”

“What about this, sir: we each throw our own cup as far as we can, and we each shoot our own cup. I don’t want you sabotaging mine; the quartermaster isn’t going to give me another one at this point. So it’ll be a closer target, sure, but the winner is the one who shoots closest to the brim of his cup, so we can still actually use them afterward.”

“Well, what’s to stop you from barely tossing it? It’s not fair if your stringy arms can’t hurl a missile as far as – hngh! – my muscles!”

One corner of Riza’s mouth twitched. She frowned.

“Ah, but sir, _you’re_ at the disadvantage.” There was a slapping sound. “These boys are 100 percent elastic. Perfect tin-cup tossers at birth.”

The other corner twitched, too. She wriggled her nose to get it all back in place.

“Mmm, I don’t believe it. Limp as wet string.”

“No, I guarantee you.”

“I could grab you around the arm, and my finger and thumb would touch. Give us your best flex.”

She was really tempted to just bury her head in her hands, but it was fortunate that she hadn’t, because just then, Vale said, “I’ll do you one better,” and there was a “No, wait!” from Miller and a brief tussling sound before a tin cup shot out over the wall.

As Riza watched the tin cup, she was a second-by-second mix of expectation and reaction: the certainty that it would fly far into distance, the cringing as cold tea flecked and sprayed, the jerk back as Vale’s late release spiked the cup into the ground not two metres away and. The tin cup let out a metallic crash, bouncing and rolling much farther through the pebbles to sit still too close to be a throw of any merit, tea leaving a trail behind it all the way.

There was silence, as the three snipers looked at the cup in disbelief. Then Riza began to laugh. Her shoulders shook, and a quivering breath wheezed out of her. “What was _that_?” she gasped between laughs.

Vale grinned and looked expectantly at a disgruntled Miller who was still staring after what was evidently his cup. “See, sir – she’s fine.”

“Good,” Miller said tersely. “You’re going to get that, right?”

“What, way out there, where all the Ishvalans could shoot me?” Vale said, waving an arm at the barren expanse. “Yes, Lieutenant. I’m getting it.”

Riza shook her head, trying to get any sense back into it as Vale trotted north to the check point to make his way around the wall.

Miller edged forwards, taking up his spot with his rifle. He leaned over the wall and yelled, “We should probably keep watch, shouldn’t we, cadet?” – at Vale, not at Riza.

And they did, watching as Vale jogged around back towards them. The soldiers at the checkpoint seemed a bit ruffled as he went, but since Miller didn’t mind them, Riza didn’t either.

“Is it really that safe out here, sir?” she asked.

“For the most part. Any Ishvalans who have come out this far have made it past all of our sentries and snipers facing the city. If they’ve gone to all that effort, they’re running away or they’re trying to attack our supplies. They’re not going to give away their position by picking off a lone soldier of undetermined skill. Besides–” he swept an arm out, much like Vale had, encompassing the endless rock and lone bush “– where would they hide?”

Vale snatched up the tin cup, holding it up like a trophy before beginning the trek back.

Riza was still back at what he’d said about Ishvalans trying to run away. Yes, even from their holy land there would be some who would run for their lives. She wouldn’t blame them after what she’d seen yesterday. It wouldn’t be that difficult to find a direction to escape, either, with the Amestrian soldiers here concentrated in one static camp.

For an extermination order, there was certainly a lot of opportunity to leave. Miller had said the other day that Brigadier General Fessler wanted to encircle the city, which was making more sense to Riza as she thought about it: keeping the Ishvalans trapped would certainly make it easier to get all of them, although with the numbers the Amestrians had here, they couldn’t support it. They’d be too stretched to be able to defend against a concentrated Ishvalan attack on the encirclement. The Amestrian troops were already stretched thin. There were different battles and areas of unrest all around the country. Central and Eastern soldiers were dotted through Ishval, trying to take several districts at once, and Southern and Western soldiers were essential in their home regions to protect against Aerugo and Creta. Drachma was blessedly peaceful at this stage, but the Northern region couldn’t release all of its troops to help at once. In a manner of speaking, Amestris itself was encircled. Perhaps the real extermination order was on the Amestrian people.

Here, in Ishval, a refugee was able to escape their cities into the desert and go – where? Trek days through the blistering sun and nights through the freezing canyons to end up at another city beset by more Amestrian soldiers? No, they wouldn’t run – not all of them. Not many, even. They would turn in and find what place of safety they could within a destroyed town that was left to be reoccupied. Even before the war was over, even now they must be trickling from places still at risk of attack to places that had been destroyed already, in hopes that the soldiers wouldn’t come back. Because there were so many places that had been destroyed, and left as they were. Amestris wasn’t moving the front line to keep Ishvalans retreating – they were going in and out of the city with such meticulous house-by-house destruction, then leaving it to let the Ishvalans do as they would. Riza had been here for too short a time to see second passes through destroyed territories. Did they go through on clean up duty to kill those left behind, or were new pockets left for dissidents to gather?

She thought of her first mission, passing by the empty houses and into contested territory. What made one territory cleared and another contested when there were no Amestrians holding the line and keeping it certain? The camp, on the top of a slight incline and with easily visible surroundings, was supremely defendable. As far as she was aware of military history, it was the best place to defend in all of the city – it must have been quite a fight to secure initially. But by holding in that one place, the general had created a commute for any missions further afield, and prime areas for Ishvalans to hide and create ambushes along the way.

There weren’t enough troops to encircle the city, and the camp was excellently placed for defence. It should have been enough, but it felt like something was wrong in it all. Riza asked herself whether she would prefer to occupy the city, finding new housing every time they moved forwards, maybe not having access to showers, and trying to sleep in a place where attack from the Ishvalans could come without warning; or would she prefer to sleep on a well-protected hill, where she had the chance to clean herself each day, and supply lines were clear enough of the enemy and the enemy’s cover that it was harder for them to be intercepted – only with additional risk as soldiers travelled into town.

She didn’t know. She couldn’t fathom how a person would make that decision for themselves, let alone for thousands of soldiers.

“You think too much, cadet,” Miller said, tearing Riza back to the three of them, not a whole encampment of responsibility.

Vale was returning, slowing as he approached.

Miller gave her a look. Who knew what this one meant. “You shot some people yesterday. You’ll shoot some more again. And you’ll keep on shooting more of them until one of them gets you or this war ends.” He turned back to Vale in time to catch the cup that was pitched in his direction.

It wasn’t what she had been thinking about. Maybe she should have been. She could conjure up the faces of the people she had shot, she could remember how they fell, and instead of that she was thinking about how different a warfront was to what she had expected. She hadn’t expected it to be glorious – it was just a lot harder to ignore the loss of life here, on both sides of the fight.

Riza looked out at the distant road, pretending there was something – anything – to look at. “I know my duty,” she said quietly.

“What is your duty,” Vale chipped in, with a tone that felt like she was being given a pop-quiz.

“To protect the citizens of Amestris.”

“Oh? Which ones?”

She frowned. “The ones who can’t protect themselves.”

“Even the Ishvalans?”

Riza jerked around. “What?”

“You know. Citizens of Amestris,” Vale said, and a dreadful sinking in Riza’s chest acknowledged where he was going even before he said it. “We annexed their country: they’re Amestrian citizens, too.”

The nationalistic streak she’d been holding onto quivered. “But they’re Ishvalans,” she said weakly.

“And I’m from South City,” Miller interjected. “That doesn’t mean I’m not Amestrian. It just tells you what type of Amestrian I am.”

The annexation had happened when Riza was old enough to remember, but too young to place to an age. She remembered her small town bubbling with talk about Ishval for months on end – talk about trade and religion and people whose ways were different from ours. Annexation was just a word, and even the Ishvalans shunned it, looking to still just be Ishvalan. To a child, it meant that’s what they were. We were Amestrian and they were Ishvalan, and that was all fine until the Ishvalan rebels began to fight Amestris.

She clutched at her rifle. Even if they were citizens, they still fought. Fighting against them was a necessary part of protecting the rest of the country.

Miller scratched delicately at an eyebrow. “Your duty isn’t to protect, soldier, it’s to do what you’re told.”

“The higher ups tell you to shoot someone, you shoot them,” Vale added helpfully.

Riza looked at these two strange men, who toed the line as needed but made a mockery of the hierarchy when no-one was looking. These were the men who spoke to her about duty and obedience. “You don’t like the commanders, though, do you, sir? Sirs?”

Miller and Vale exchanged a glance. “Not particularly,” Miller responded. “They’re not like us. They sit safe in their offices and make decisions that put soldiers’ lives at risk. But someone has to see the whole picture from above. You can think an order is stupid, but you still have to follow it and hope that they see something you don’t.”

“And if they don’t see something else,” Vale added, “you just have to be good enough to take down the guy coming for you.”

_“Before they disarm you.”_

The glare Miller gave her was piercing, looking at her but also beyond her. Vale looked away, but even so, something passed between the two men at that time that flew over Riza’s head.

Riza opened her mouth, even before she knew what to say, and just had to close it again. It was Vale who ended up breaking the silence: “So you just do what you can to stay alive. You shoot the Ishvalans. You protect the soldiers. Your comrades – that’s who you’re protecting. And you obey orders, because that’s what your duty really is.”

\---

Mustang stripped off his gloves as he finally left the laboratory. He folded the gloves over on themselves and stuffed them away into a pocket – away, never to be seen by the light of day, if he had his way. Or night, even, which was more appropriate since evening was approaching.

He stood in the shadow of the fortress and looked out at the camp, where the day-long cooking fires were being joined by campfires for heat. There were fewer campfires these days than there used to be – the nearby houses had already been emptied of anything burnable, and there was no wood to be had. The compressed gas cylinders had to be kept for the cookfires, since there was only so many of them, and food was non-negotiable.

That was possibly his most pleasant job. Many of the alchemists had helped improve the camp when they arrived by putting their skills to work, and his knowledge of altering the chemical composition of gases made him well-suited for refilling the gas cylinders when they were out, which they frequently were. Instead of having to use burnable debris for food, the soldiers could use it for heat, now. Cookfires never went out mid-meal anymore, so there were fewer cases of food poisoning. He’d helped.

A distant scream echoed out of the barred windows of the fortress behind him. For the most part the soldiers nearby hunkered down, eyes averted, but one turned his head and met Mustang’s eyes for a brief moment before he seemed to realise what he was doing and whipped back around.

Mustang put his head down and walked briskly, putting space between him and the business of the afternoon. How many screams did the men out here witness? Had they heard him at work today?

He strode by the scattered fires and past men who pulled away as he went. The deeper into the masses of soldiers he travelled, the narrower a berth he was given, until finally he was just any man in a crowd once more, and no-one turned to look at him as he passed.

Trudging through the camp, he set his eyes on the goal of a hot shower. Not many people could boast they managed that, with the cold well-water at hand – even alchemists found it hard, since unless you began from ice, you couldn’t draw an array on the water itself. There were so many uses for fire beyond the main one he’d been given.


	9. Chapter Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter that wouldn't stop. Things I was writing about needed to be dealt with sensitively, and the whole story is about not looking away from the horror of war, so I was fighting a battle of how to do it all. I kinda don't want to spoil things, because suspense is a big part of story making, but I thought it would be better to include this warning than not.
> 
> TW: it touches on sexual harassment and rape culture.

The next day they were on the southern perimeter, directly facing the city. Instead of behaving like children, Miller and Vale were calm, seemingly rational people again. The southern perimeter was mostly made up of buildings, with the gaps between them walled up sandbags or alchemy. Those sections were guarded by sentries, and snipers were fairly evenly dotted along the rooftops.

As they threaded through streets to find a good location, Miller assigned their buildings: he’d take Barracks J while Vale acted as spotter for Hawkeye on M. With Vale calling her targets and giving her a heads up on any extenuating factors like wind, he’d be able to verify the quality of the sniper they’d been sent. It would make it easier to know how to allocate tasks within the team – whether the team was better off with her sniping or guarding their backs as flanker, or if she should be prioritised on extreme long-range targets or quick work in battles like with Comanche’s platoon. The missions they were given wouldn’t change, but it may mean the targets she was given would.

After they separated from Miller, Riza noted a spring in Vale’s step. He’d been so dour and to the point on their missions up until yesterday that she just thought that was who he was, but it seemed like yesterday’s lightness was still there, albeit more restrained. The serious moments could have just been the effect of being in the city where they were under attack, or the threat of it.

Vale gave a brief knock on the door frame of Barracks M, and a few shuffling steps preceded the curtain being whisked aside by a man with a disgruntled expression.

“Sniper change-over,” Vale chirped.

The man blinked heavily. “Already?” He stepped back, holding the curtain open just long enough for Vale to catch it and push through. Riza followed on his heels.

It was fairly dark inside, all of the windows covered up by cloth, not just the ones facing the Ishvalan city. Other than that, it was just like her barracks when it was fully set up, with beds out and occupied, although she wasn’t used to there being so many in use at this time of day. Soldiers trying to sleep filled every bed, some obviously disturbed by their entrance, and Riza’s curiosity in glancing at the barracks was curbed when a man rolled over and his thin blanket went with him, riding up over hairy butt cheeks. The desert sleepwear of day crew and night crew were vastly different.

As she and Vale moved past the man at the door, Riza caught him craning at her in her peripheral vision. She heard a sound that could have been a snort or a snuffle, and readily left the room of soldiers behind as Vale led the way up two flights of stairs.

They emerged up onto the roof, ducking as they came up the last few steps so they wouldn’t make easy targets for enemy snipers who had evaded the perimeter guard so far. A sniper was set up under his desert-coloured coat in one corner of the roof, up against the ledge. He looked around as they came up the stairs, eyes alert, and jaw working on some gum or tobacco.

“Busy morning?” Vale asked, scurrying over.

The other sniper was already packing up. He grunted. “Most of it watching our troops go into the city. This hasn’t been a real front line since the alchemists arrived.”

That was six months ago, now. The alchemists had been deployed at the start of Riza’s final year as a cadet. She was meant to spend the last half of the year getting active combat practice, before she’d come home to graduate – and then what?

Vale indicated to Riza where he wanted her to set up and unslung his own pack to get at the instruments he wanted. “You’d think the alchemists coming would have slowed our casualties some, wouldn’t you?”

“Depends on the alchemist, from what I hear. Some of them are better at aiming than others.”

Riza slowed in unrolling the material around her scope. “Are there … casualties on our side from alchemy?”

The off-duty sniper gave her a grimace. “From some of the ones that are harder to control.”

“Alchemy that’s harder to control, or the alchemist?” Vale muttered. He waved a goodbye to the other guy as he left and shrugged. “They’re alright for the most part. You listen around for how quickly their platoons need to get replaced, and you’ll soon figure out which ones you’d prefer to work with.”

Riza nodded. “How many alchemists do we have in camp?”

Vale pointed her towards the city – unlike yesterday, they actually needed to pay close attention to the perimeter today – and Riza turned to her work, ears perked up as he went on. “Just ten. You saw Comanche in action the other day. He and Colonel Grand are our more experienced battle alchemists. Other than those two, we have a few researchers finally pulled into action, and a couple of greenhorns. What a place to prove your mettle, hey? Oh.” Something like an apologetic looked flashed across his face.

“Just … doing our duty, like the next soldier,” Riza offered.

She was rewarded with a smile of recognition, and Vale leapt into the task at hand. The city before them was a cluster of broken buildings, not much of interest for the Ishvalans, except as a possible place to prepare an assault on the enemy camp. Anything of interest in those houses at the edge had already been destroyed or pilfered by Amestrian soldiers. Riza found the windows and gaps between buildings that could hold an Ishvalan, and while they watched for movement and real targets, Vale had her make several shots at targets of his choice.

“What’s your preference – mid-range and moving or distant and stationary?” he asked after she’d chipped the edge off a door frame he’d asked her to hit.

Whichever was least likely to be an actual human. “Distant and stationary.”

He leaned in and pointed. “Try through that alley there. Can you see the third house back?”

“Barely.”

“Aim as close to the corner as you can. Around head height.”

She lowered her head to peer through the scope. The angle of the alley made it a narrow target – a quiver to the left or right and she’d hit the houses on the edge of the city. Aiming for the second house back would have been much easier, but she could see that sliver of the third house and lined it up carefully, breathing long, slow breaths to ease her heartrate.

“Ishvalan!”

Riza stopped and pulled back from the play target to look for the real one. She’d been mid-exhale, primed to shoot, but this was more important.

“Two windows over,” Vale instructed. “She ducked past, but she might look out again.”

And she did – a wide-eyed child’s face poking up over the bottom of the window, so close to the frame that the sun lit her up like a massive target. How old was she? She looked directly at the Amestrian camp, as though unafraid. But she couldn’t be. Maybe she was transfixed by the might standing before her, a rabbit frozen by the predator’s approach. Riza felt Vale’s proximity keenly as she hesitated. She leaned in close to her rifle, setting her sights on the little girl, and breathed, asking herself if she was really going to do this.

It turned out she wasn’t. Before she could settle herself, someone else made the shot. The impact sent the girl back, and Riza was spared the sight but not the knowledge that she was here to shoot children.

“Ah well, next time,” Vale commiserated. After a pause, he clicked his tongue. “That’s an inexperienced scout for you, leaving the shadows.”

“A scout,” Riza murmured, the energy she had leaking out of her, leaving her with heavy limbs and a dull tone. It shouldn’t have to make sense, but it did. In battle you use whoever is available to you, for whatever they are capable of giving, and a child could see just as well as any grown-up.

Vale nodded. “They send them every now and then to watch troop movement. Maybe to gauge our defences.”

She looked back at the window. “How do you know that they’re scouts and not just children?”

“We have to kill them either way. What would you prefer?”

Vale’s blank expression suddenly told Riza a new story: not of a man who didn’t care, but of a man who was doing what he could to live with himself. This was the armour she was going to have to wear – the sort of self-deception that pretended there were no such thing as innocents.

She bent over her rifle, eyeing off the target Vale had given her earlier. Third house back, down the alley. A shadow came up over the wall then dipped back away, and she tensed – another Ishvalan! She swallowed, not sure what she was looking for. At first she expected a person to come hurtling through the alley, but the sun was high in the sky and the shadow of someone in the street wouldn’t reach head height on the wall. She looked up at the rooves, and found a tuft of hair sticking up over one ledge. It moved around, and the top of a head came up. She was ready this time.

“Gunman–”

Her shot rang out, hitting the man’s head just off-centre and spinning him back against the adjoining wall on the roof. Riza sat back, looking at Vale.

“Hmm. Well, you can be fast,” Vale conceded. “Good eyes.”

The barrel of the gun Vale had referenced was sticking up in the air, unbalanced by an arm or leg that had wedged it up. Riza watched it topple from its uncertain balance with a measure of satisfaction. The previous target had been a surprise. She didn’t know what she would have done if this one had been a child as well, but she had shot him. And it had been someone with a gun. There was a quiet voice inside her head that pointed out that every person she had shot was a bullet that could be justified. People with weapons, coming to a fight. There was still honour in the fighting she did.

“Yeah,” Vale said, somewhat to himself. “With a bit of experience, you’ll be a good team member.”

Her eyes flickered over to him, gauging the remark. “Thank you.”

Vale’s attention snapped to her, his own sharp, dark eyes looking out from under a dark fringe. “The last guy was not so quick. You don’t want that in a teammate.”

The last guy. The person who had died and whose place she was taking. She’d only ever pictured Miller and Vale together, working as a team of two – they were so in sync that it seemed right that there had only been two of them before. The realisation that there had been someone else hit her like a slap in the face, a strike against the sense of immortality that she thought she’d already doffed. It was a warzone. Of course allies were dying as well as enemies. She’d even seen two of them dead the other day, crushed by the building that fell, and yet how quickly she forgot.

“How did he die?” Her throat tightened as she asked, a strain that she coughed to clear.

Vale swiped at his nose. “Third house back. Go on.”

Riza let him avoid the question, and moved back on target. He’d probably answer later. The city was still, not a mouse, nor a shadow moving. No distractions this time. She breathed in and zeroed in on the corner, right on the edge of the clay. She breathed out, counting heart beats. One, two, three – bang – four.

The clay cracked, a large chip falling out. It had skewed left, but the size of the chip encompassed the corner, so that had to count.

“That’s a narrow target,” Vale mused.

Riza looked quizzically at him. “You’re the one who set it.”

“Decent timing,” he added. “Quick and accurate – that’s good. I guess Miller’s going to have to cede that you did get all of those kills the other day.”

The shift was relatively quiet after that – Vale kept pushing Riza to test targets, further away or in quick succession, but they didn’t see any more Ishvalans. A few gunshots further along the border could have been bored sentries picking targets just like they were, or could have been Ishvalans beyond Riza’s range. They’d find out at the end of the day when they saw who went to add to their tally.

When the end of the day arrived and their replacement appeared, Riza was glad to scurry off the roof and back down into the barracks where she was able to stand up properly and stretch. Vale did the same beside her, the two of them paused on the upper floor as they felt the relief of cracking vertebrae. Riza rotated her feet, feeling her calves stretch back out from plain old lumps on her legs. Pins and needles roared up in defiance.

Vale did the same, saying, “It doesn’t get so bad if you wriggle your toes a lot. That keeps the blood moving.”

“I thought that’s what the heart was for,” Riza groaned, massaging at her calves.

One of the barrack’s residents popped into view at the bottom of the stairs, no jacket to show rank, just an expectant expression disappearing into a frown as he took in the two of them. “You the sniper changing out?”

They both responded in the affirmative, Vale’s response sharper than Riza’s in the wake of the interrogative tone the other man used. She straightened up as she gauged the situation.

“You can’t just bring your woman on shift, you’re meant to be watching up there,” the man spat.

Riza restrained herself quite well. Part of her wanted to turn red and disappear, and another part wanted to be Rebecca and yell snarky comments back at him. Or maybe for Rebecca to be there to do it so they could roll their eyes together about it afterwards. It had taken four days before she had run into the assumption that she’d only made it this far by sleeping around. Not bad. Then there was another, quieter part of her that was suddenly alert in a way she hadn’t been for a long time at the academy.

For the most part, Riza had found her fellow cadets to be fine soldiers. Friends, comrades, brothers- or sisters-in-arms. Then there were the least part, in quantity but also quality: those who joined to have an outlet for their machismo. The bullies, egotists, or unrelenting flirts who couldn’t take no for an answer because it belittled them in front of all the other men – the other strong, dedicated, respectful men who were very much a threat to their inadequate masculinity. The men who had to be alpha, in the most animalistic sense, and when they couldn’t win a mate – through charm or persistence – they were compelled to prove her not worth having.

“Actually, _she_ was meant to be on watch up there. I was supervising,” Vale snapped, stomping down the stairs, and gaining the attention of a few other soldiers in the lower room.

How they were currently treating women around them always came down to the sense that women were meant to belong to someone, and weren’t valuable individuals on their own. She’d found academy easier when she’d seemingly attached herself to someone. The higher rank the better – the insults to her face were rare when she began to take tea regularly with General Grumman, and left the other cadets to think what they would of that.

“Huh. Supervising,” the guy said, glancing at his platoon-mates and motioning at his crotch. “Sweet cheeks, if you need supervising, you can come back any time for a better flavour.”

She didn’t say anything as they left, ignoring the laughter, and maybe there was one remonstrating voice she heard there among it. Riza pointedly readjusted her rifle as they passed their host – so the strap sat more comfortably – and was happy simply to escape.

Miller would be a better option than Vale. He was a Lieutenant, and that could make a significant difference if she was going to have to spend time around the male barracks. Or, really, the man had assumed that she was already sleeping with Vale. The more consistent her attachment seemed, the less likely it would be that someone might try to brush it aside and pursue her anyway. But with either Miller or Vale, she couldn’t be sure either of them wouldn’t want something from her that she wasn’t willing to give. So far they hadn’t, and spoiling that by approaching either of them for protection wasn’t what she wanted within her own sniper team. It was what most women ended up doing in the academy – if they weren’t actually dating someone, they might find someone willing to lie and say they were dating. It very rarely backfired, but with her history drawn all over her back, she was unwilling to risk it.

They wound their way through the buildings, Vale powering on ahead. Soon Riza realised he was swearing and muttering to himself as they went, a veritable storm cloud on legs. Riza was somewhat taken aback by his anger. Was that concern for her? She hurried her step to get closer to him, thinking to calm him or tell him she was fine, but as she neared she caught some of what he was saying and her eyebrows rose in astonishment.

“Unprofessional” … “know how to do my job” … “risk the camp”.

Oh. She finally allowed herself to roll her eyes – no, he wasn’t upset on her behalf, but on his own. Instead of hearing how she had been entirely dismissed as a soldier, he had only heard someone accuse him of neglecting his duty. Well, it was a serious accusation in an army camp, she told herself, even as she internally threw her hands up to be rid of any concern for him.

That evening when she related the account to those present of her roommates, neither of them seemed particularly surprised.

“You’re young, you’re cute. Get used to it,” Tamsin said as she unfolded her cot by the light coming in from the hallway.

“I am used to it,” Riza said, “but that’s not my point. The Sergeant Major completely ignored it – he just got angry and said nothing.”

She was curled in her cot, washed and clean for the day, and wanted to cleanse herself of this experience by laughing at it together, the way that she could with Rebecca. Instead of laughing, the other women picked the experience apart and made her think about it all again in the most infuriating of ways.

“And you’re ignoring the repercussions it would have on his career if you had been distracting him from his job,” Fala pointed out. She was the tanned woman who Riza had met the first night with Tamsin. She worked in communications, like the majority of the other women, but was still surrounded by men the whole time. “If he was suspected of dereliction of duty, he could be arrested and court-marshalled.”

Riza stared at Fala. “That’s a serious thing, of course, but it was a misunderstanding. He was on task, he was an excellent spotter for me, and the word of all of the other snipers and sentries on duty will attest to the fact that nothing got through our section today. The only reason the other soldier thought Vale may not have been paying attention to his job was because I’m a woman. Because, being a woman, I couldn’t possibly also be a soldier.”

The other women shared dubious looks, and Riza found herself staring at a communications officer and a medical officer, realising that the ratio of genders in either of those fields was closer than in hers, and it made more of a difference between them than she had expected.

She cast around for another way to explain it. “If Sergeant Major Vale was arrested and court marshalled,” she tried, “it would be because that one soldier couldn’t conceive that I could be a sniper.”

Fala dropped down on her cot. “Right, but you said the sentries and snipers will say he was doing his job, so he won’t get arrested and it’s fine.”

“The problem wasn’t with what he was doing, though – it was with me. Being there. And all he did was get angry about being insulted.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing, too?”

Riza frowned. “But both insults – to his work ethic, and to my, well, my entire role in life – are solely based on my gender. None of this would have happened if I were a man.”

“This isn’t the only problem being a woman is going to get you,” Tamsin interjected, fluffing her pillow before she climbed onto her cot, too.

“I know, but–” Riza cast around for some way to share the sense of injustice that had been welling up in her all afternoon, and all she had was, “it shouldn’t be like this.”

Fala rolled over. “If you don’t want to deal with dirtbags making comments, just tell them you’re taken.”

“You can even write back home and get someone to send you a ring,” Tamsin added, wriggling a beringed finger in the air. “It’s made my day a lot easier. Now when patients flirt, they don’t really mean it.”

“There are a lot of decent guys who aren’t all gross out here, too. Pick one of them and they can rough up anyone giving you a hard time.”

Riza sighed. It was the same as the academy, after all – pick your protector – only at the academy she was among other women who hated that they had to do that. She’d thought she was telling a story of a shared frustration, but the older women were just used to living with it. Maybe it was different in their professions –men still offering unwanted attention, but not questioning that they were working in that role. Something about the incident frustrated Riza in a way that it didn’t frustrate them, and they couldn’t sympathise with her.

But they tried. Fala gave Riza a commiserating look, peeping over her pillow. “It’s only words, Riza.”

Tamsin made a conciliatory sound. “Mm. If it goes any further than just words, tell someone. They’ll get a formal reprimand.”

Any further than words and they’d get a reprimand. Told off and put back together to play again, released into the warzone like good children who shouldn’t be antagonising each other.

At the downturn of Riza’s face, Fala jumped in again. “But it’s okay, that doesn’t really happen much. If they actually want something more, there are places they can go, so it’s not like anything bad really happens to our ladies.”

Whatever that meant, it went over Riza’s head. She frowned at their reassuring faces. “Places they can go?”

“You know, if they want _something more_ ,” Fala repeated, eyebrows raising.

Riza got that part, and waved it aside, looking at Tamsin for clarification.

Tamsin’s mouth drew flat in a disapproving line. “Brothels,” she said blankly.

“Oh.” Riza blinked. Well. “Out here?”

“If you’re going to take thousands of men away from their families, you need to offer something as a substitute,” Tamsin said in a discomforted drawl.

Fala nodded fiercely. “Lilah was out here before the call houses were set up properly. You’ve seen how protective she gets.”

Lilah was the stone-faced woman who took first turn outside of the shower tent most nights. She was one of the three other women who were soldiers, and at thirty years old easily the oldest female soldier Riza knew. She must have been one of the first to sign up when women were allowed to join the ranks. She’d spoken to Riza a few times, always with a gentle tone and a sweet voice, but when she sat outside the shower tent, her face hardened. She took that role very seriously.

“It sounds like things are a lot better, really,” Fala continued. “I mean, they don’t bother us when they have somewhere else to go.”

Someone flicked the light in the hallway off, finally, and Riza lay there in the dark, uneasy with herself. There were the trailed off noises of conversation coming to an end and goodnights being said, but Riza tuned them out. If this was the society she was meant to accept, then the world was not right.

\---

Mustang flicked the pen he had borrowed from the officer the next tent over. He’d been staring at the page in front of him for too long now, trying to compose a letter home. There was no way he was going to tell them about what happened in the field, or what happened in the fortress. A part of him wanted to hide that from them forever. What if he told them and they stopped writing when they found out who he’d become?

When he was at home and spoke with Madame, she usually liked to hear the gossip he’d overheard – she’d taught him from an early age that there was a lot you could learn if you kept your ears open in the right places. The most interesting part of what he’d heard today would be removed by the censors as it passed through: reinforcements were being sent, finally, a whole second brigade to help cut off retreat for fleeing Ishvalans. It probably wasn’t worth writing if it was just going to be taken out. He would have written it anyway, because Madame would enjoy puzzling out the blanks between the parts she could read, except that if he wrote too much giving away classified military information someone would start to take notice, and he got enough attention from the higher ups already.

All he had written was:

_Madame,_   
_I am still fine._

It felt petulant and resounded in his ears like the whiny neighbourhood boys who didn’t know how to talk respectfully to their mothers. But he didn’t know how to talk to her anymore. He didn’t know what of this hellscape he could possibly share with her. Nothing else he had to say had congealed beyond a lump of emotion and tension into any semblance of words.

He picked the pen up once more and made himself put it to paper, but all he could bring himself to add was:

_Please write again soon,_   
_Roy_


	10. Chapter Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to my good friend, Griselda Banks, and our other Verbosity denizens for putting up with my seemingly incessant questions as I remember how to write again! ("What's another word for this phrase? Should I use this technique now or save it for later so it has more impact? How do I bring to an end a conversation that just keeps going?") I'm regaining my confidence one chapter at a time, with your help!

Soon the dystopian normal of the warzone was starting to sink in for Riza. She spent time on sentry duty, alone for the most part now they’d verified that she could do her job just fine, and rotating around the camp through the week. She sat at the campfire to eat during her breaks, or to grab a cup of tea when it was on offer, and listened to the soldiers bluster and banter. They usually grouped together with their platoon mates, but there were no official formalities around the campfire other than those given to officers, so she was able to slot in where there was a space.

She saw Evan and Isaac again, cheeks dirtied and eyes glazed as they returned from a mission in the field. They regaled her with stories of Colonel Grand and the spiked, weaponed iron walls he pushed through the city, like an unstoppable truck bearing down on his enemies. She told them about Major Comanche and how he danced with his sword, a pinball bouncing off targets.

She found out that the chalkboard by the door of the barracks was customarily used to keep track of the inhabitants’ kills – only the top scorers were put on a public board. In the women’s barracks, where most of the occupants were in non-combat roles, the board had been co-opted into some sort of message space, the four soldiers relegated to a small rectangle down the bottom where their numbers were written in each soldier’s own handwriting, only their initials attached to the number. It was like no one in the barracks really wanted to know how many kills their roommates had made. Riza didn’t blame them. Her own number was now in the late 20s, and not the lowest despite having been here for the shortest time by far.

She heard soldiers around the fires talking about their number like a game, comparing to see who was deadlier or better. The talk made her recoil, but still, after every day with another shot that had met its mark, she went back and chalked up on the board yet another death she was responsible for.

Perimeter duty was slow work, taking its toll in the mental fatigue of watching, always watching. It was a while before she was finally sent into the city again, and when the day came Riza met it with equanimity. Her legs were ready to stretch out again, and she wanted the space to move, but she couldn’t make herself glad of the opportunity.

The mission had two sniper teams sent ahead to find the optimal route through this ruined city for a company of soldiers and their vehicles equipped with missiles. There needed to be room for vehicles to move, and areas for the missiles to be set up. The blasts would encourage Ishvalans to run, escaping houses that were potential graves, and would herd most of them on into an area where alchemists could deal with them.

The snipers went ahead to mark the route. The alchemists would come with the company and be in place to finish it all up. They were too precious to send out without protection.

It was a change in tactics – a sudden push by Brigadier General Fessler to empty the western side of the city, destroying buildings as well as masses of people. The destruction should drive the enemy back on itself, further into the city, so they could be captured in a smaller area. On the way into the city, Miller had been spitting Fessler’s name out alongside some of the filthiest epithets Riza had heard – apparently another brigade was finally being sent from Central, and the Brigadier General was trying to prove himself before they arrived, so that he could be credited with the taking of the city. A commander who didn’t want the competition of reinforcements. Riza didn’t voice her opinions the way Miller did, but they certainly didn’t vary far from his.

The two sniper teams had separated, at first winding through empty streets and marking buildings in chalk where the company following an hour behind should divert to avoid difficult terrain ahead or potential traps. It wasn’t long before they reached areas where they started noticing Ishvalans, and the winding paths became stealthier, taking them deeper into the territory. They marked for the Ishvalans they saw, too, but didn’t shoot them. It was too early to raise their guard.

Sightings of people became denser as they went deeper. Vale had his eyes set on a high watch tower or clock tower he could see over the other buildings, just ahead of where the company would be pushing through – he wanted the best vantage point where he could sit and pick off Ishvalans headed away from the alchemists.

In order to avoid being seen, the team had to scale the side of a building and hop up onto the rooves. It was where they would want to be when things started, anyway. Vale scurried off to his tower, and Miller and Riza found places near each other on some taller rooves further south, where they could keep an eye out for enemy gunmen taking cover inside houses, or messengers running for help.

Riza had hoped they’d find houses that didn’t have roof access, so they wouldn’t have to watch their backs so closely. They didn’t have a squad of soldiers accompanying them this time – it would have been harder to evade notice with more men. She’d have let someone look over her shoulder all afternoon, if it meant she didn’t have to be exposed on this roof alone.

She lay as flat as she could, head low, feeling the sun beat down on her as she waited and hoped that no-one would come up the stairs.

The sound of missiles whistling through the air was a most incongruent relief – like an approaching shriek, growing louder as they arced closer. Every muscle in Riza’s body tensed as she hoped beyond all hope that the missiles were following their predicted arc. How far did they need to diverge to accidentally hit the snipers instead?

Then the explosions started rumbling through, one after another as missiles hit nearby. She gripped her gun, feeling the tremors through the building. A wave of fear rushed at her, and she brushed it aside as well as she could between explosions. The Ishvalans would be making their decisions now: to hunker down or to start running. She poked her head up above the edge of the roof to see just as another missile hit, around thirty metres south, spewing rocks and dust up into the air. Two more times, missiles exploded – both still south, and at a more respectable distance.

Movement caught Riza’s attention as the first Ishvalan emerged from a house, head swivelling to see the explosions. He wasn’t far down the street, and when another explosion shook the buildings he ran back inside. Riza didn’t know how many houses she should expect to be occupied. Enough that they needed to be cleared. More to the south, where the alchemists would let loose.

When Miller’s tirade against the Brigadier General had slowed down, he’d told Riza to hold her fire at the start. “We want them to get out of their houses and start running from the explosions, not to hide away when they realise snipers are there. Wait until they’ve committed to running, so they’re more likely to keep going and stay in the open.”

So she watched as more Ishvalans began emerging, laden with what possessions they could carry. A young couple were first, only seconds before a man bearing a gun came to a skidding stop onto the street. He shouted back into the house he’d been in, watching the street as he waved back at the house. Further down the street, children burst out from another house, followed shortly by two women and a man, one of the women heavily pregnant and shooing away help as she gestured towards the children.

Riza sank down below the ledge, the metal of her rifle hard in her hands. There were so many civilians. So many people just trying to live their lives. But this is what an extermination campaign was – not just attacking those who could defend themselves, but wiping the whole of a people out.

The sound of Miller’s rifle cracked through the air, and she took a deep breath. There were shouts from down on the street, a wailing and pattering of feet as those running realised how close the danger really was. She looked over the edge as Miller shot again. There was a young man on the ground, bleeding and still, and the second shot seemed to have just missed the man who had come out of his house with a gun, who was now half-in-half-out of his doorway. Even as Riza adjusted her rifle, more faces appeared at the windows of his house, gun barrels coming up as eyes scanned the rooftops. Riza lined one up, pulling the trigger just as Miller finally got the man by the door. They both fell.

One of the others in their house started firing on Miller’s position, and as Riza zeroed in on him, a young woman appeared in the doorway, straightening up with the dead man’s gun. Riza made both shots quickly, the woman holding the gun as though to shoot, but sweeping her gaze over the rooftops for a target nowhere near Miller. She looked directly at Riza as Riza pulled the trigger, and dropped dead to the ground as the bullet found her eye.

Miller started shooting again soon. His shots ringing out brought some weird sort of relief – they hadn’t got him.

Still, people ran. There may have been twenty people spread through the length of the street. Riza’s eyes flickered over them, almost all carrying their belongings in their arms, steeling herself for what was to come. Extermination.

She let Miller start it. Waited for his lead. And she may not even have started shooting if he didn’t mess up his first shot. It was an old man, trailing along with a stick to ease his path. He cried out as Miller’s bullet struck his shoulder, and went toppling to the ground. Already Miller had moved on to the next target, a girl up the road dropping at his bullet. Riza looked at the old man calling out in pain, and gave him mercy. His cries ceased. And that was the excuse she made to herself: Miller wasn’t accurate enough. This was the job she was told to do, and she could do it quickly and accurately, which was better than the alternative.

Before she could think any further, she forced herself to start. There was no rational thought to be had about the process. What was the point of asking whether she should shoot the young man carrying the crying toddler, or the old woman? The pre-teen yelling in windows as he passed, or the woman inside one of the houses he’d just passed, quivering as she considered the street? There was no good option, and as Miller shot them, so did she, choosing targets even as she told herself that she wasn’t differentiating between them.

Some people ducked back into houses instead of chancing the snipers in the street, but the explosions nearby kept on rumbling through, and many of them came out again, running as fast as they could to get to safety. People came down alleyways from areas closer to the explosions, staggering as they emerged into this street and saw the bodies on the ground. They were easy targets for that brief, stunned second, although at the mouth of the alley, their bodies were now a warning for those coming behind them.

Miller’s voice broke over her shoulder: “We need to move. Find a new place where they’re still running.”

They ran over the rooftops, leaving Vale behind in his tower and taking turns to watch each other’s back as the leapfrogging left them exposed to eyes below. The missiles kept flying, and civilians looked up as they began to run, certain to see their own death in the sky. She saw them stumble as their fear of a missile turned into the reality of snipers leaping over the rooves. The snipers shot them and kept moving.

Twice they had to leave the relative safety on top of the buildings because a street finally intersected and stopped their path. Both times Miller made the call that they would scale the outside walls instead of entering houses, uncomfortable with the risk in what was proving to be a relatively populated area. It was a good call – she had to shoot a man on one building, who had burst up in some sort of an attack. He hadn’t realised there were two snipers, and leapt for Miller with a knife. She wondered whether he had been in the house already, or whether he’d sought them out. She kept her body half turned towards the rooftop stairs even while she kept taking targets off the street.

She saw children running and yelling into houses a lot.

“Messengers,” Miller said, and he shot them. She shot them too. A lot of the time people didn’t come out of houses when the children yelled into them, but when they did they were looking up, not into the sky but to the tops of the houses. Some of them held weapons in uncertain hands. Messengers.

Miller shot a mother and then the wailing toddler who was left crying over the body.

She couldn’t do that. She could shoot the teenagers and the couples, and the old people struggling to make it down the street, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill the small ones, and this time instead of thinking of herself as retaining some sense of morality for it, she just let the people she had already killed today flash before her eyes, and asked herself how long it would be until she found that she could shoot an infant after all.

Miller saw it before she did. The great wall, rising up to the south. Their street was quiet at that point, and instead of telling her to get moving again, he nodded up at the horizon. They watched the wall as it came up, over the tops of the buildings, the length of the end of a street at first and then growing wider, to get the nearby streets as well. She thought of what Evan and Isaac had said about Colonel Grand making walls of spikes and weapons that he pushed through the city, and wondered what sort of power it would take to make this wall move. But it stayed where it was. Instead, one of the buildings near the wall exploded, a flash and then bricks and clay flying out in a massive arc towards the street the wall blocked. The building next to it followed, and then the one after that. It was like the impact of missiles, but bigger and without the whistling sound of the missile arriving. All of the buildings had turned their bricks into projectiles

How many people were trapped there by the wall, crushed by the debris of the houses that had fallen on them? The explosions kept coming, often houses, but sometimes not. She could hear distant screams interrupted by blasts, and still Miller just had her sit there and watch.

“That,” he said, as the screams started getting louder and closer, “is the Crimson Alchemist. He has the fastest platoon replacement rate of all of our alchemists, but he gets the job done.” Miller crouched down by the roof’s ledge, and she followed his lead, already hearing why they were still there. They were waiting for the Ishvalans who had turned around when confronted by the alchemists.

Then there was what sounded like another explosion but with a greater roar – the whoosh of gases and crackling overtaking the hard sound of debris knocking against itself. It instantly brought both snipers’ heads up, and she saw the great fireball spread, enveloping houses, flames whipping up into the sky among the black smoke that poured up from it. The light burnt an after image against her eyes that she saw as she blinked – but she struggled to turn away.

Miller breathed out. “Wow.”

A pit opened up in her stomach. Her eyes prickled, and so did her back. She remembered a candle – a candle, that was all – being lit from the other side of the room.

“That’s the Flame Alchemist,” Miller said through the tumble of her thoughts.

She knew.

A tiny little candle. That’s all it was meant to be. He would use it to save the world. How was he meant to use a freaking candle to fight in the military? Who knew. Who cared when it was only so small? He would help the war effort, but he wouldn’t be too strong. All he could do was light that stupid candle, and they could use that somehow to help. She knew he was going to have to kill – he would have had to do that as an infantryman anyway – so why did it matter that he did it faster, bigger, better? Why did it matter that he was being made to do it with the knowledge that she gave him?

She knew he was going to kill. Why did she give him a better weapon?

He was going to protect Amestris.

He was going to _protect_ them.

“He just appeared out of nowhere. Crimson has nothing on him.” Miller glanced at her. “Don’t look for too long – you’ll need to be able to see your targets.”

It was hard to tell when the mission was meant to end, but at some point there were no more explosions of any sort – missile or alchemical. That was good enough.

There was a lot of backtracking, past a trail of bodies. She averted her eyes, trying to watch for movement and keep her footing without taking in the rest of it. Miller looked at everything, looking where and when he pleased.

“Headshots,” he mulled.

She looked blankly at the back of his head, then returned to sweeping for danger as she followed him.

“You don’t aim for the chest,” he pushed.

Her lips pulled at each other to come unstuck to talk. “It’s a faster death.” Her mouth was dry.

“It’s a harder target,” he prompted again, some sort of attempt at conversation, maybe.

She wasn’t in the mood for conversation. “Then just don’t miss.”

A muffled snort of laughter burst out of him. It took her by surprise, but at the same time she realised she had been speaking to her superior officer – a trained sniper – as though he was a terrible shot. Which, well, he wasn’t entirely, but he definitely wasn’t as good as she was. Her own insubordination welled up, and she wasn’t sure if she could care about it right now. At least he didn’t seem to care either.

“Eye of the hawk,” he confirmed. “You’re good.”

Her eyes flickered over at the street and the scattered bodies, and she jumped over onto the next roof. This is what she was good at. Killing people. The afterimage of fire had long disappeared from her eyes, but it came back to her mind. Yes – she was very good at killing people from a distance.

That evening, Hawkeye returned to the camp. She suffered the shoulder pats of her comrades and made it back to her barracks. She stared for too long at the chalkboard on the wall, debating whether civilians were included in the count she was meant to keep. In the turning of the planet they mattered just as much as any other death she caused.

She couldn’t put a number to it. She’d counted as best as she could every person who she’d dropped with a bullet, but now she knew there were more than just those people. Tenfold more. Maybe even a hundredfold. All she could do was count the ones who she’d shot – if she ignored those for whom she pulled the trigger, then how much more was she ignoring the people who died in flames that she had created? So she counted all that she could.

No-one looked at the board – not openly. Despite that, she was given a wide berth by the other women in the barracks, except for stone-faced Lilah who silently brought her a cup of tea. Her number had more than doubled. It wasn’t enough, but they didn’t know, and even so they all averted their eyes.

\---

Another fire burned itself out while Mustang watched. The soldiers with him picked their way through the smouldering wreck, giving numbers to the charred remains of bodies. There was a thin, blackened arm stretching out from the rubble, all the fingers but one clawed, muscles contracted with the heat. It pointed at him. There. There is my murderer.

He averted his eyes.


	11. Chapter Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm finally posting another chapter! I had a while where I had to take a break (my life was overscheduled and writing was the only thing I could really move), and I've just finished an editing project that had a fairly solid deadline, so now I can come back to my stoooories. Thank you so much for reading. It will take me a little while to get back to the pace I was at before, but I hope to get back to posting roughly once a week again eventually.
> 
> The benefit of having had so long for this chapter to sit before I got to proofread it is that the time that passed made it a lot easier to identify sections that dragged on. I deleted two massive paragraphs about food quality that were useless. Don't worry, food-lovers - I can tell you those boring details later, if you really want!

Hawkeye found that past the initial introductions to those she came in frequent contact with – her team and the women in the barracks – people didn’t really ask names in Ishval. On missions, the snipers were referred to as a team, or Lieutenant Miller dealt with the details. Around the campfire, people didn’t need names – you either joined conversation or you didn’t. They might use ranks, if you had your displayed.

“Hey! Sniper lady!”

Well, that was the closest thing to a name Hawkeye had, as far as other soldiers knew.

The approaching soldier joined her at the end of the queue for food. He was tall and broad-shouldered, along the lines of Miller’s physique but without the facial hair. She recognised him as one of the guys from 9th Platoon’s Delta squad, the section of Major Comanche’s platoon that took to the snipers whenever they worked together. Hawkeye had wondered whether their regular assignation away from their platoon meant they were more capable or less. In any case, she was glad of the extra eyes. This one she remembered had been her shadow the last time they worked together.

“Corporal.” She gave him a nod as a quick greeting.

He was young – about her age. He had probably graduated recently. Maybe last year, when she would have graduated if she hadn’t moved to the sniper track. His accent was reminiscent of the open fields not far south of where she grew up, and she wondered if they had begun as cadets together – just in all different classes.

“Do you know what they’re serving today? Meat balls? Big lamb roast? What about a nice lasagne?” He wriggled his eyebrows at her, a tired grin on his face.

“Oh,” she said, peering down towards the front of the line, where soldiers were holding their plates out for something off-white being ladled out of a large pot, “unfortunately, it looks like they’re all out of the roast. Better luck next time, sir.”

He sighed loudly and scratched his head with the hand holding his cup. “Just my luck, hey?”

“So it seems.”

She was about to turn away when he added, “That shot on the generator was solid.”

Hawkeye took in his open, hopeful expression. He was trying to make conversation. “Thank you.”

The previous week they’d been sent to engage with a makeshift communications set-up. The standing instruction of “shoot all Ishvalans” had been complemented by additional non-human targets for once: the local radio, a fairly simple construction in and of itself except for the massive generator that had been powering the system. The generator was too big for the job it had been given, and the potential for it to be reallocated to more strategic (Amestrian) use was a high draw card for the Brigadier General. The plan had been to retrieve the tech, not destroy it, which required an alchemist with more finesse than the explosions that Riza had seen more frequently now in the city.

What happened when they arrived could only be thought of as a trap designed to take down the alchemist. The Ishvalans must have known the draw of generators for Amestris’ stretched power lines, and they must have become familiar with the various alchemists, because the number of warrior priests surging out from the surrounding buildings towards Major Comanche was the first attack of its kind Hawkeye had seen. The other alchemists she’d heard about had big explosive or defensive styles that could have dealt with a full-frontal attack from any number of fighters, but Comanche fought up close. They would have overwhelmed him if he hadn’t called for the retreat so quickly. If he hadn’t sacrificed half of his men in order to make his escape.

The snipers, in the protection of Squad Delta, had a few extra moments to breathe before they had to run. It was Hawkeye’s first good look at the warrior priests’ fighting style. They were fast on their feet, with large, jagged knives. The quick jabs they made were like some armed mix of boxing and the close-combat defence techniques they taught in sniper training. Hawkeye had never particularly excelled at it, but she recognised the forms in some of their movements. Seeing them in action, the sudden understanding had come over her that in close combat she would be useless against any of these Ishvalan fighters.

As she tried to follow their movements and lock on to any of the warrior priests, Miller had ordered Hawkeye to take the generator out of commission. That was a much easier target. And so even though they retreated with significant losses, they had crippled the Ishvalan communications capacity.

“There wouldn’t have been much opportunity for it without Delta,” she offered the corporal.

The pained expression on his face seemed about right considering the extreme losses the other squads took. “Ahh, you know. I’m glad you didn’t take your time about it.”

They shuffled forwards with the line, holding their plates and cups out for gruel and water as necessary. Hawkeye began to walk off to find a seat, but he was only a moment behind her.

“So, uh, what did you join the military for?” A wince appeared on his face. “I mean, if you’re happy to talk about it?”

She blinked at him, at first surprised by his continued presence, then the question and the realisation of how inadequate her response was. She’d joined to protect people. To protect civilians. “I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore,” Hawkeye said, slowly lowering herself onto a large rock set back from a freshly lit campfire. “Why I’m here. Because I am, and I’m still a part of all of this, whether it was my intention or not.”

A stillness came over him. He blew a loud breath out of his nose. “Yeah, life isn’t really going to be the same when we get to go home. If we make it. I wrote back home about what was happening here once, and now my mum thinks I’m some sort of hero. She writes all the time about how proud she is that I’m serving our country and how I just need to make it that bit longer until they send me back.”

“She either thinks you’re a hero or she thinks you’re about to die,” Hawkeye murmured.

“Or about to kill myself.”

Hawkeye nodded speculatively. She suspected if he did he wouldn’t be the first. In the week that had just passed, she had flirted with the idea. Taking her own life shouldn’t have been any harder than the lives of those people running on the street. She wasn’t even a civilian. She wasn’t even running.

But killing herself wouldn’t stop the war, and unlike other people she wouldn’t only be leaving a corpse behind; she would be leaving a weapon entirely unguarded. How many people would handle her cold body as they prepared her for the grave? How many chances for someone to catch a glimpse of the tattoo? They would wonder what it meant, and have her wrapped in the grave cloth soldiers were wrapped in to stop their decomposing bodies from falling apart in the desert heat, putting it from their mind forever. Or they would send for someone to decipher it – an alchemist, no less – and shortly another flame alchemist would be born here in Ishval, ready to assist in razing it to the ground.

She’d seen more of his explosions. Those big gusts of flame roaring through streets and sending up pillars of black smoke. They disappeared quickly – more quickly than she’d known a natural fire to do. She wondered if his victims screamed. She’d never been close enough to hear anything over the roar of the distant flames. She’d bet they screamed. They did when she closed her eyes at night.

“If I die, it’s going to be in some blaze of glory,” the corporal said. “Some heroic act as far as my mother is concerned, or a moral stand.”

“Oh?” Hawkeye asked. The lumps in her gruel were thick on her spoon. “None of those regular deaths for you, then?”

“Shot while on guard? How boring. Shooting yourself? Cowardice.” His tone offered a weak sort of playfulness that didn’t totally agree with his words. “No, I’m gonna hurl myself on top of a grenade to save my squad. Or draw attack to myself to give them time to escape.”

She saw the guilt pass over his face. Yes, instead of protecting his own comrades, he had been stuck with the snipers, flanking them uselessly, having to take glory in her shots because he wasn’t there to protect his fellow soldiers. All this talk about death – was it just his guilt for not having been there? For being held back by protection detail?

“Maybe I’ll get executed for refusing an order,” he offered in a glib tone. “What a way to go.”

That would be the way to do it. Making a stand and choosing not to kill this or that civilian. She could die for a cause like that. Instead of gratifying his desire to die, she just said, “Thank you.”

He cocked his head at her, torn out of the suicidal dream that was perhaps more real than he’d suspected.

Another voice broke over them. “Havoc! Hey!”

The corporal looked up, then back at Hawkeye with that perplexed look on his face – then again to the soldier who called his name and waved him over. “Sergeant Firth. Hi.”

“For guarding my team,” Hawkeye explained. “I keep on realising just how vulnerable we are, so focused on our targets that we can’t watch our own backs.”

The sergeant approaching gave her a wink. “Aw, no problem!” It was the Delta squad leader, who had commented on how she had shot the minigun on her first mission with them.

Hawkeye offered him a weary smile, but was pleased enough with his company. He was brash, but he was familiar. Better for him to join their maudlin conversation than one of the soldiers who complimented how she killed, or boasted about their own conquests and brutality.

“If we’re not around, your team watches each other’s backs, though, don’t they?” Sergeant Firth commented, picking up the conversation thread he could snatch at as he sat down with his own glob of food-facsimile.

Havoc, the corporal, eased back out of his stressed hunch and listened.

Hawkeye nodded. “We do, but sometimes we need to split up to cover more ground.”

“Be careful with that.” Firth winced. “You know if it looks like you could get caught you need to drop your sniper rifle and get away from it, right?”

The way he said it struck her as strange. “Why do you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like the rifle is the problem.”

Multiple times, in briefings and on trips in and out of the city both Miller and Vale had told her to drop her weapons and equipment and to run if she was going to be overtaken. She’d always thought it was purely about freedom of movement so she could escape faster.

Firth gave her a bleak look. “Because if they know you’re a sniper, odds are they’re not just going to kill you.”

She didn’t tense up, exactly, but suddenly Hawkeye found she was very aware of herself. The loose grip she had on the bowl in her lap. The way hairs on her back prickled against the fabric of her uniform. The pressure of her shoes on her swollen feet.

“What do they do?” she ventured.

Havoc and Firth exchanged uneasy expressions.

“It’s happened a few times. Protection detail gets killed straight up,” Firth said, jabbing a thumb into his own chest, “and the sniper gets taken. You know your team had another guy before you came in, right? Sergeant Major Vascoe?”

She hadn’t heard his name before, but she nodded.

“It’s pretty much the same for every guy it happens to, as far as I hear it, but I worked with him a few times, so this one stuck in my head a bit more. He, uh … We weren’t there – I think your guys were just out alone. Lieutenant Miller and Sergeant Major Vale came back to camp without him, and we thought he was just killed in action. But there was another mission later, same area I guess. The platoon that found him brought as much of him back as they could find.”

“As much of him ...?”

“Yeah.”

Hawkeye’s stomach rolled. Her hands shifted just that little bit to move her bowl away, the thought of food beyond her, now.

“I heard he was still alive when they cut him up,” Havoc said in a dull, hollow voice.

Firth shook his head. “How would anyone know that, though? He was dead when the platoon found him – it could have been any time.”

“But why would they cut him up afterwards?”

“Maybe they were low on meat or something,” Firth said. He threw a hand up, and flashed an apologetic look Hawkeye’s way. “No, sorry. I don’t know. But they didn’t just kill him on the spot. They took him somewhere else and they butchered him, dead or alive I don’t know.”

Hawkeye watched the winces on the men’s faces. “Because he’s a sniper?”

Firth was a mix of looking straight at her and avoiding her eyes. “I guess. They’re the only ones it’s happened to, so far. Although I bet if they got their hands on an alchemist it’d be the same.”

She met Havoc’s eyes, full of sympathy and unease.

“It’s because of the civilians, isn’t it?” It slid out of her mouth in a whisper, a hidden confession – her own guilt confirming it in her heart.

But Havoc shook his head, with dead eyes. “ _Everyone_ shoots civilians. What do you think Delta is doing every time we cover you?”

No, that was true. She knew that – she’d heard the children screaming, even in her first mission with them. They were all guilty.

“It could just be because snipers are more of a threat,” Firth said, brow lowering. “They’re scared of you, so they need to prove to themselves that you’re only human by seeing what’s ins–”

“Sir.”

Hawkeye had put a hand over her face. Her guts were churning inside of her, imagining the slice of their curved knives against her skin. It was a tickle against the edge of her brain – her mind reaching for the memory of a needle jabbing her ten thousand times. She could swear she knew the pain that she would feel, but it slipped out of her grasp, leaving her only with roiling stomach acids rebelling against her equilibrium.

“Mm. Well.”

“What do you think of Colonel Moska? Ah– sir?”

Firth ummed and ahhed for a while as he switched tracks. Hawkeye was silently grateful for the respite. “I think he shouldn’t be leading a brigade as a Colonel, that’s for sure. Why didn’t they just promote him if they were going to make him do a Brigadier’s job?”

“But is he any good, sir?”

The times her teammates had told her to drop her weapons and run flashed through her mind – no detail of why, no sense that it was anything more than a regular combat threat. Then Miller’s words from her first guard duty on the north-eastern checkpoint came to mind:

_“Before they disarm you.”_

Was that a sick joke? What sort of –? But no – he had been enraged. He had been bubbling fury beneath that comment, and she hadn’t understood why. He wasn’t going for a play on words, but an actual warning that had somehow come out as a terrible pun. Either that or he could engage a terribly dark sense of humour even while he was overcome with anger.

They may have been trying to protect her. They’d given her the instructions to drop her equipment and run, and that was what had to happen. Why tell her the reason behind it, if it could only make her afraid?

But she knew that she couldn’t die here in Ishval. She’d confronted that only this last week: if she died, she was leaving the knowledge of a great weapon unguarded, and whether it went to the Amestrian military or the Ishvalan insurgents, it was still too great a power to give to anyone else. A power that perhaps shouldn’t have been shared in the first place.

She cursed her father’s name over and over in her head. She should never have shown Roy Mustang the secrets of flame alchemy. The last time her father had smiled was so long ago she’d only seen it in pictures, but she could hear it in his voice as his ghost whispered, “I told you so.”

The benefit of her fury was that it kept her from feeling afraid. She couldn’t stop here in Ishval – she couldn’t kill herself, or be arrested and executed for disobeying an order, or be caught by Ishvalans looking to eke out their revenge in Amestrian blood. She was in a battlezone, and her death could very well birth a greater wave of destruction. She couldn’t die until she had figured out how to destroy her father’s research.

Sergeant Firth and Corporal Havoc had drifted into a steady conversation about the new Colonel from Central and the troops he had brought with him. There wasn’t much to know about him yet, except that his troops had set up a temporary camp and they obviously intended to move on from here quickly, when Brigadier General Fessler and Colonel Moska had come to a consensus about the next course of action. Fessler must have been gratified to still be the highest in command, but his posturing and pushing on into the city had not eased. There was still something about him that gave the air of a man trying to prove his worth. Colonel Moska didn’t seem to be helping the situation – even from a distance there was a natural haughtiness about him. He spoke in a nasal whine that had earned him the nickname “The Mosquito”, and held his head slightly back, as though to look down on the soldiers he commanded.

Hawkeye sat and listened to the men talking long enough from her stomach to settle. She ate what more she could of her food and excused herself.

Havoc gave her a quirked smile and a wave.

Firth sat back, lighting up a cigarette. “No problem, Eye of the Hawk. You stay safe.”

She nodded and left. That was the plan.

\---

The alchemists didn’t all gather very often. They sometimes worked together in pairs or threes, but when they were gathered too close together in battle they’d be more likely to interfere with each other’s alchemical processes. Mustang never worked with Allague, for example, because the Wind Alchemist’s transmutations made changes in air pressure, which disturbed the particles Mustang’s flame alchemy was trying to transmute, and made it harder to control. The risk of a rebound became too high.

The result was that although they had common interests and common topics of research to share, none of them really knew each other well enough to talk and discuss. They were a nervous bunch, all in the one room. Mustang took them in with curious interest. He hadn’t realised how few of them there really were – and yet Ishval quailed before them.

Brigadier General Fessler seemed irritated to have them all squashed into his command building, but he could hardly complain when he was the one who had called them to convene there.

Fessler set his mug down on the table, not standing from his chair to address the men crowded in with him. “Tomorrow morning, we’re putting into motion a true siege,” he intimated.

Mustang’s ears pricked up. A commanding officer giving advance warning? Unheard of.

Fessler went on: “Our battalion will move from here to occupy the city. The camp will be left with a rotating maintenance guard, but the majority of our actions will take place from the forward push. That means any testing you’ve been attached to will have to be put on hold while you are part of the occupation.”

Something in Mustang’s chest tightened, just as something else loosened. Pushing into the city would mean more death – but he would do it readily to be away from the fortress for more than just half a day. The thought made him want to sob. He would kill a hundred Ishvalans gladly if he didn’t have to do it slowly.

Monster.

A voice on the other side of the room asked, “Is Colonel Moska taking the camp?”

Fessler grimaced. “No. Colonel Moska will take his troops south, to push them north against us. This camp is defensible enough that it will survive without a full complement.

“Tomorrow morning you will pack your tents and receive your assignations. If you have any urgent business or time-specific experiments, I suggest you see to them tonight.”

He said little else of value before he dismissed the alchemists, obviously keen to be rid of them all. As the alchemists dispersed, Mustang found himself falling into step alongside Alex Armstrong.

“Finally on the move,” Mustang said, in some attempt at conversation.

“Yes,” the large man responded, his mouth in a taut line. “The soldiers have been here a long time. It will be hard on them to move from here.”

Mustang looked over at the tents and dilapidated buildings they were passing. “It’s not much to leave behind.”

Armstrong started, then eased back into his stride with an intentionality Mustang didn’t miss. “Of course not,” he said, but his voice was uneasy. “Excuse me, I have business to attend to.”

Mustang had no reason to hold him, and so let him leave. He watched as Armstrong diverted away to the barracks the lower ranks occupied – such a large man could hardly be covert, but the easy wave of his hand to a soldier he passed seemed like a cape covering the tension that lay underneath. Mustang considered following him, but his hunger called him towards food instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve not read any specifics on this, but I’ve heard that in war snipers who are caught are treated worse than regular soldiers. Of course, that depends on what time period we’re talking about, who they’re caught by, etc. To be honest, if a sniper was caught by a warrior priest like Scar (as he is portrayed in the Ishval flashbacks, at least), I don’t expect that they’d be treated any worse than anyone else. The Ishvalan fighters seem to have a high sense of honour and respect, and I don’t think the “humiliate the enemy” mindset would be a respectable part of their culture. But every culture has its subversive streams of thought underlying the mainstream, so while a person who tortures an enemy combatant may not be held up as the ideal Ishvalan, there is evidence in the manga that some Ishvalans, by this point in the war, have veered from the traditional honourable path (in Chapter 60, when the men encouraging Scar’s brother to pursue renkinjutsu and rentanjutsu speak with Scar about seeking power and revenge – these men may not be in for torture, but there is that vicious undercurrent alongside those like Scar who just want to protect their people).


	12. Chapter Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally did a little bit of research into bathing habits in desert countries, and I should have realised: MASSIVE BATHS. It’s very Roman-style, and it seems like a lot of water in one place for a desert (it must take so long to draw the water to fill a public bath – yes, these were all the rage before modern plumbing), but it would be less water than each individual would take for separate baths, so I guess it saves water, all up?
> 
> If my chapters had names, this one would be called "Time Passes".

The first night in the city, Hawkeye barely slept. Somehow the camp had become a place of safety – she’d already endured the barracks and showers, and knew that Ishvalan attacks were unlikely to make it past the sentries. Here, there was no pause from the fight. There was no moat of safety between where the soldiers were bedding down and where the Ishvalans could hide.

They came across a bath house in the day, four great big rooms with massive baths cut into the floor, designed for groups at a time. The water in the various baths had mostly gone or turned brackish, and not many soldiers thought the water worth the risk of their health. Hawkeye eyed the large, open rooms, knowing that she’d stretched to the limits of her risk-taking with the showers back at camp. She had the first inkling then that this could be a very uncomfortable push into the city.

She was still grouped with other women to sleep – not as a matter of any formal organisation, but because Second Lieutenant Petrova saw her winding through the occupied buildings at the end of the day and urged her to join where some of them had gathered together. The men were bedding down as squads, so it wasn’t like there was somewhere she was meant to be, anyway. It was quite similar to the previous barracks, since they’d already been bedding down in an old Ishvalan house, but now there were more buildings to go around, and the women were spread along the line where they worked. Here, there were only four of them together – Hawkeye, Petrova, a medic named Jonte, and another communications officer named Alsmith. They slept all in the one room, finding some measure of comfort in each other’s presence.

The second night, the fighting didn’t stop for darkness. The Amestrians had pushed far enough into the city by then, a long, sweeping line of soldiers pushing forwards like a net to catch and dispose of any life they encountered. When they came up against machine guns nestled in properly built barricades, even the alchemists had to step back to save their hides. The darkness coming on acted as a shield for the Ishvalans, who managed to hold their ground for most of the night.

The soldiers kept on with shifts, but there were more on night shift than usual, now there was actual combat to be had – and when Hawkeye was allowed to get some rest, she huddled under her blanket, listening to the occasional exchange of gunfire and wondering if she’d hear if Ishvalans came creeping back through the buildings to reclaim them. In the morning, the line was moving forward again – the light of day enough for an alchemist to destroy the guns from a distance, and the Ishvalans dealt with.

It turned out that guerrilla action was remarkably quiet, as compared to the traded gunfire that became the norm at night. A week into the push, they woke up to swap shifts with soldiers who had pale, insecure faces, passing along the news that four squads of soldiers had been killed in their sleep. Some Ishvalans had crept in among the buildings the soldiers were sleeping in, and silently cut their throats one by one. The enemy was finally spotted between buildings and were shot by sentries before what they’d done had been discovered. Three men killing Amestrians while they slept – that was all.

The Amestrians were heavily reliant on the alchemists. In the daytime, they carved a path through the city, the alchemists raining destruction down on men, women, and children in their paths. The soldiers behind them cleared buildings, making sure no-one had been missed. The Ishvalans learnt this quickly enough, and it soon became common for their fighters to hide themselves until the alchemists had passed so that they could spring an attack on the foot soldiers, who were a lot easier for them to take on. It was a three-fold tactic: they were able to do a lot more damage to the soldiers; they could try to surprise the alchemist from behind; and if an alchemist turned and tried to assist the foot soldiers, they often did as much damage to their own men as to the Ishvalans entangled with them.

So as time went on, the front line slowed, while the alchemical destruction kept on moving forward, lines of burnt out buildings and streets of rubble with Ishvalans lying in wait. The alchemists would aim for key targets while the foot soldiers did their best to clear the mess left behind.

The sniper teams were stretched out, trying to cover as much ground as possible so that they could be an effective defence against the enemy when they emerged in the middle of an Amestrian platoon. Miller had the team climbing the outsides of buildings to find their vantage points – if they found themselves on a house with access to the roof, they were to move on. Even if it was as simple as hopping to the next building, the extra ten metres was ten metres more to prepare for an enemy seeking them out.

On nights when Hawkeye was assigned to the front line – a real front line, now, not like the camp on the hill – she watched for the flashes of muzzles as rebels started shooting, and crept closer in the dark to find a good hideyhole with a decent line of sight. With the dark as her shield, she felt safer hiding among rubble than on top of a house. On a roof, she would cast a clear silhouette. A nice, well-distributed pile of rubble had large chunks of building and smaller bits of debris intermingling – clay, brick, metal, with lots of overlapping shadows. It was harder to distinguish what was meant to be there from what wasn’t when there was so much variety in size and texture. Her uniform became dusty and the material over her knees and forearms was wearing thin from crawling through debris, but she was still alive.

She was itchy everywhere. Her oily, dusty scalp. Her neck. Her back. The creases and crevasses in her elbows, behind her knees, her underarms, her groin, under her breasts, her wrists and waist where cuffs and waistband held all the sweat to her body – and her feet, oh, those sweaty, itchy socks and shoes that didn’t totally dry out in the night! The nervousness of waiting in position to shoot any Ishvalan she saw made her itch even more – she didn’t march or clear houses like the other soldiers. They probably forgot about how itchy they were while they were focused on their job. She knew she would miss a crucial target sometime soon because she was too busy trying and failing to ignore the sticky feeling of sweat creeping down her back.

Some soldiers risked the bath houses they came across – and the further into the city they pushed, the better quality the water seemed. These baths hadn’t been abandoned for as long as those in the outskirts, and the Ishvalans had maintained them for their own hygiene. A bath house could have three rooms with empty or languishing baths, and one in near-pristine condition ready for anyone’s use. The attendants may have fled long ago, but those Ishvalans who stayed behind still took care of the spaces they used.

It became common for Hawkeye to notice moments of great care alongside the neglect of abandonment. She couldn’t help but wonder how beautiful this city was before Amestris interfered with it. The streets were littered with rubble, but an untouched house could be immaculate inside, decorative bowls carefully arranged on the table, or curtains for the door woven in beautiful patterns. They captured a temple after a long afternoon of fighting, a great, open building with pillars that reached up higher than any of the houses outside the courtyard and murals that had glittered when the Amestrians arrived, but that had been dulled and partially destroyed in the fighting.

She had never seen bodies decomposing in the streets before – someone had always taken the time after the Amestrians retreated to come and collect them and bury them somewhere. Now there was no-one left to bury the dead. When the front line didn’t move far enough in a day, the wind brought the smell of day- or week-old corpses that had been left out in the sun, surrounding the city in a choking miasma. The Amestrians collected their own dead until they could be returned home, but while they were in the city there was nowhere large enough to keep them except the temple. Ishvala hadn’t ever seemed quite so real to Hawkeye as he did when they intruded on his temple and she wondered, sickened, how an Ishvalan would react to seeing it so defiled. Even with almost daily trucks returning loads of dead to the camp where they could be buried, and the high, shady ceiling protecting them from the sun, the smell was unholy.

Hawkeye felt as though she was constantly on edge – the persistent smell, the never-ending gunfire, the eternal itching – the moral quagmire was too much to fully comprehend, because even the fear that drove her to keep on surviving was dulled by her exhaustion and irritation at the conditions she found herself in. Food was still edible, probably due to the proximity of Eastern farmlands to the Ishvalan border, but it wasn’t much better than that. She ate mechanically to relieve her hunger, slept fitfully between exchanges of fire, and returned to her itching, showerless existence each day killing the targets she was given. It became harder to remember the faces of the people she shot, so she just kept track of her count and let that guide her latent guilt. More than once, Amestrian soldiers smashed decorative urns and pocketed trinkets from houses they went through in full view of their commanding officer, and she watched blandly as the man let it all happen without any thought for the people who used to live there.

Sometimes women left their houses at gunpoint, heads hanging low as they were taken behind Amestrian lines; the soldiers waited until they were gone before they executed the families they left. Hawkeye wondered if the women knew their families were still killed after they agreed to join the Amestrian brothels.

She saw him, once, from a distance. Mr Mustang. The Flame Alchemist. She was on her way to the building Lieutenant Petrova had claimed for Amestrian women’s quarters, exhausted from keeping watch at the front for so long her eyes had started to twitch with her pulse.

He was sitting with other soldiers, weariness evident in the hunch of his shoulders. The very sight of him brought her to a halt, and she stood stupidly in the middle of the path as she took in the bags under his eyes and the grimy streak across his face. Where was that boyish charm and hopeful innocence? It was like looking at two pictures laid over each other: the young man she’d met at her father’s house, and the alchemist who caused such destruction in the field. Feelings she’d never quite let solidify were hardening like fat cooling on the surface of a pan. Greasy, unattractive feelings, like betrayal. Bitterness. Like the understanding that he’d deceived her, and had given her hope in a future that not only couldn’t exist, but that he had worked against with the power she had given him.

There, she saw a monster hiding in human skin. But one that she’d helped create.

Even as her mouth twisted and she attributed all Ishval’s pain to him, she saw the emptiness echoing in his eyes. His lips quirked in something like a smile or a grimace, and she remembered a young man who had really had those hopes he proclaimed. No, he hadn’t deceived her; they had both been too naïve. That beautiful dream had been ripped away from him when he had power the military wanted – that she had given him. He had given her hope, and she had taken it away his. Yet another person whose life flame alchemy had destroyed.

She kicked herself back into gear, unable to meet his eyes and hoping that he hadn’t noticed her.

\---

The campfires weren’t the same as in the camp on the hill. They were small – hidden beneath overhangs of debris, surrounded by soldiers not just because they huddled for warmth but also to hide the light. The fires were put out when full-dark came on, and soldiers were left to be kept warm by their blankets, even when on duty. Cold, but not a lit-up target.

Mustang found himself joining all different men around the fires. They made way for him, letting him huddle in by them, eyes wide as they noticed the rank of Major. There were more alchemists of the rank in camp than regular officers, so even if they didn’t know him, they knew what the typical significance of the rank.

This evening, the huddle he’d joined already had six men there, sharing a flask between them. He hadn’t even noticed the flask until he joined but it was immediately offered, and he took a grateful swig before passing it around.

“Good work today, sir,” one of the soldiers said.

Maybe they did know him. “Oh?”

“Only two artillery ambushes reported along the line so far. They’re mostly just down to pitchforks and shovels, it seems.”

Garden implements. One advantage of steamrollering through the city had been how impossible it made it for the Ishvalans to collect weapons off the fallen men. The enemy was losing arms, and Amestris was able to put them to good use in the hands of her own soldiers. The fact that Amestris hadn’t been doing this earlier or hadn’t at least been collecting weaponry off the bodies before retreating, made Mustang wonder at the intelligence of the commanding officers. It seemed like a distinct oversight to have let the Ishvalans keep collecting their weaponry for reuse. The fact that Ishvalans were using garden tools this far into the city, where there were no farms, vineyards, or gardens to be seen meant that they were importing them in, rather than guns. Maybe their suppliers were finally stepping back from the fight.

“Bloody farmers,” another man spat. “Coming at us with trowels and pruning shears.”

“Don’t forget the hoes!” a third said pointedly, and was met with a snort in response.

“Arnolds won’t, that’s for sure.”

Mustang eyed the indicated man’s growing scowl. No visible scratches or scrapes, maybe something under the uniform – oh, or –

Arnolds muttered something, the tail end of which was, “They’re all syphilitic and half-cold anyway.”

“Yeah, after you’ve been with them,” a soldier said as he took another swig of the flask.

“Don’t worry, Arnolds,” someone else said with a laugh, “None of them had the pox until you gave it to them.”

“Yeah, well at least I haven’t fathered anything while I’ve been here.”

“That you know about!”

Mustang shifted away from the men bickering, holding his hands out to the fire. A bit of heat and then he would move on.

The man on Mustang’s other side cleared his throat. “So, ah, sir, do you have a trajectory for tomorrow’s push?”

Mustang eyed the flames. “As broad a path as I can manage, just west of the hospital.”

“You aiming for something?”

He shook his head. “Just whatever is there.”


	13. Chapter Twelve

“Today should be as simple as staying behind Colonel Grand’s line of fire, and watching for an attack from the rear,” Miller said as they gathered with Grand’s platoon.

Vale threw his hands into fingerguns. “Easy.” He made little popping sounds with his mouth as he blasted his fingerguns at the soldiers around them. It was not particularly reassuring.

Hawkeye gave a nod of understanding and surveyed the small group. She recognised them as the men she had arrived at Ishval with – young, excited soldiers, now turned into these tired, hardened men. There were only twelve that she could count, and her hopes that the rest were still on their way were rudely set aside when the group started to head out. How many had come on the trucks? Maybe two or three times this number. She glanced around, trying to identify as many of them as she could, and found Isaac in close conversation with the squad’s Lieutenant. There was no sign of Evan anywhere. Was he in the medical bay, or waiting for collection in Ishvala’s temple?

The group was so small; where were the reinforcements to fill in the spaces of those left unfit to fight? But even as she wondered this, she knew that all of the platoons had been shrinking since they came to the city. There had been too many surprise attacks – many deadly, but even those that weren’t were still diminishing their numbers. Yesterday a grenade thrown through a window had sent an entire squad to the medical bay. Jonte, one of the women in the area, had been the medic on duty at the time, and she’d talked about it in the evening: a whole squad out of commission at once. Three of the men would need automail, and all of them would need close care to recover properly. Still, better that than being sent to the temple.

The camp on the hill had been a safe haven as compared to occupation of the city. It had given the Ishvalans easy hiding places in the unwatched territory, and had most likely prolonged the war, but the clear perimeter and the proper sentry posts were a defensive dream. Hawkeye had found herself eyeing off the potential viewpoints on missions ahead of the captured territory. There were some nice, tall towers not too far ahead. The Ishvalans had some snipers to make use of them, but Amestris would capture them eventually, and then they could start building a proper defence again. For now, they would just have to be level with the rest of the city.

Miller drew ahead to join Colonel Grand, Hawkeye and Vale trailing after him.

“Ah! There’s our back up,” Grand rumbled, eyebrows arched as he noted them. That was all he was waiting for, apparently, as he set off with great, sweeping strides, setting a quick pace for the soldiers as they made their way toward contested territory.

Miller pushed on towards him. “Sir, I understand we’re clearing alongside a path you made yesterday?” He barked, in a tone of voice Hawkeye rarely heard him use. There was something like respect in it – the clipped, trained way of talking to someone in command. He didn’t even talk like that to the Brigadier General when she’d heard him report in.

Grand grunted. “We finished the day yesterday in sight of an area that should afford us a tactical advantage, where Daliha comes to an end and meets Arja. The Ishvalans have it for now, but it’s too open for their fighting style – it won’t work as well for them as it would for us. They’ll fight to keep it just to keep us out and in tighter spaces.” He sniffed his displeasure at the narrow roads, scowling at an alleyway they passed. Too small – all too small. “Today we’re widening the road. We’ll move as quickly as we can and make a path for the troops and vehicles to come behind us when it’s ready for them. I need your eyes above us, on the lookout for enemy movement, so that we can complete this job today.”

Hawkeye turned to see what Vale thought of a mission widening streets, and found that instead of keeping behind the Colonel and Lieutenant, he’d pulled even with them up on Miller’s side and was peering around at Grand. It rankled at her sense of hierarchy – the man never stayed put unless there was something to shoot at. She itched to pull him back into step with her, but it wasn’t her position to do so. Miller didn’t seem to care, but he’d never cared much about rank, and Grand didn’t seem to notice.

As they stepped through into contested territory, the snipers took to the rooves. The buildings were smaller in the area they’d come to, many of them only a single floor now instead of two. It wasn’t quite a slum – the buildings were still very well made – but the size of the houses and the narrowness of the streets didn’t have the grandiose feelings of the great plaza outside the temple, or the wide roads they’d just passed. It made leapfrogging the houses physically easy, but narrowed the angle required to covertly check down the alleyways as they kept their eyes open for the enemy.

Most of the checking was fruitless. Occasionally they came across scavengers robbing the dead, and once a woman trying to drag a whole body away. To bury it, or to strip it for meat, no-one knew. It had been a long time since they’d seen any livestock, and in camp Hawkeye had found herself sitting over her own meals shipped in from the farms to the north of Ishval, wondering what the Ishvalans had left. The Amestrians had destroyed enough food stores to create a famine under regular circumstances, but the diminished population may be managing with the little they had. Or desperate enough to be looking for new sources of food.

The bodies strewn in the street were relatively fresh, left from Grand’s mission the previous day. They simultaneously acted as a fierce warning to any other Ishvalan that may come here, and an invitation to those mourning or desperate.

The snipers skipped along the rooftops on what was an almost boring mission. Every now and then one of the soldiers down on the street would yell up at them to get out of the way, and they’d jump over to a different house as Grand alchemised the one they’d been standing on. The house would squeeze all the holes out of itself, the offending wall moving out of the way by slamming up against the other side of the house. The effect was to clear a wide path for the road, and to turn the snipers’ path home into a series of balance beams instead of solid platforms. There was, of course, the added benefit of knowing the immediate buildings either side of the path were no longer an option for potential ambushes – and the drawback that now the Amestrian forces were in an incredibly open area, with no immediate cover. Hawkeye was happy to stay on the rooftops rather than become a sitting duck down there.

She was pleased to see Isaac taking charge of a squad, although the source of his promotion was evident in the absence of his comrades. In a brief pause in their work, he joined her on the rooftops to share rations.

“All right, Hawkeye?”

She inclined her head and accepted the biscuit he was holding out to her, eyes flickering back to the landscape of rooftops, watching for movement in the alleys below.

He sat down without invitation. “You got any bread?”

“That’s a poor exchange,” she huffed, but dug out her kit anyway and tore a crust off for him.

He turned the crust over in his hands, inspecting it. “Mine was already mouldy by the time I got it. Now I have an excess of butter and no option but to beg.”

“Or to share,” she pointed out, nudging her empty butter tin at him.

Isaac thought for a moment, but relented, pouring a great dollop of mostly melted butter into her tin. “A tip for your services.”

She smiled. “A return to equivalency.”

They sat peacefully munching on their rations, sharing the peace that came from a battlefield already won. The Ishvalans had been scared off by yesterday’s battle, civilians in retreat. Any movement out there could be dangerous – rebels coming to search them out – but for now it was still.

“I’ve heard your team is the best we’ve got,” Isaac noted. “We need that at the moment.”

The movement of Isaac’s head back towards his platoon derailed any thought Hawkeye had about the quality of her own team. There were so few of them – of course they needed the additional support. She swallowed before proceeding. “Was there an ambush?”

She couldn’t see his face – it was too important that she kept her eyes on the streets below – but her peripheral vision showed a slump of his body. The streets were still, but she kept staring.

Eventually he spoke in thoughtful, slow sentences. “There have been many ambushes, and a cumulative loss over these months. More lately, since we’ve had fewer men to watch each other’s backs. If we don’t get reinforcements soon, we’re not going to be able to protect the Colonel properly, and if he goes down …”

If the Colonel went down, there went one of their strongest, best strategic alchemists, and a career military man to boot. He was no researcher who had only just pulled his head out of its books to help out here – he had joined the military to fight for his country, and he did it effectively. The loss of Colonel Grand could cost them weeks or months before they finished the job in Ishval, and would pay a toll in the blood of the soldiers who died in that time.

“Well, we’re glad to have Sniper Team Five with us,” he concluded. “I hear an Amestrian hasn’t died on your watch in the last week.”

Except for the ones who also happen to be Ishvalans. But no, the last week had been pretty good. And the one before that.

“There were still injuries,” Hawkeye pointed out. “But thank you.”

“You keep this up and they’ll make some weird nickname for you. The Triumphant Trio. The Thorough Three.”

She rolled her eyes, and was glad the tone in his voice seemed to indicate that he found it as ridiculous as she did.

“What’s it like working with Sergeant Major Vale?”

Hawkeye frowned. “What do you mean?”

Isaac made a noise in his throat. “Well he’s … He’s top of the killboard.” He cleared his throat and staggered on. “Do you think someone who kills that many people can feel sorry for it?”

Hawkeye didn’t know how to receive the question. She was awash with the certainty that the number at her hands was not as different to Vale’s number as she would like – it was just much less visible for lack of the barrack chalkboards at the moment. It would quite certainly put his number to shame, if you included those who died in the Flame Alchemist’s fires. Pulling the trigger had become easier, because she’d managed to dull herself to the questions of morality by reminding herself that she had to keep on living long enough to figure out how to destroy the secrets of flame alchemy. How did someone like Vale bring themselves to keep on shooting?

It was true that he was eager to engage the enemy, and he certainly talked about his numbers a lot, but when it came to the Ishvalan people, he was full of respect for them and dismissive of Amestrian governmental policy. Hard to think of that as true respect, though, when he still spoke with glee about finally toppling Carcano from his place at the top of the killboard. That competitive need to be at the top of the board was what made him an excellent sniper – and a terrible teammate.

Sometime into the push, it had become apparent that Vale’s risk-taking behaviour was going too far. When the team was assigned night duty, he’d creep forward into contested territory to take shots at the Ishvalans, even where they’d be able to see his muzzle flash. Or if they were set to protect the soldiers aiming missile launchers, he’d move so far from them to find his own targets that he was hardly able to perform the task he was there for. He would just take up, alone, and find his own battlefield to fight on. Hawkeye had begun to get the feeling that whenever Vale was set near her, she’d really be better off just watching her own back and assuming he didn’t have it.

Even now, he was off past Isaac’s platoon, several houses deep into the next area and still on the move – more like a sentry on patrol than a stationary guard.

“He’s not heartless,” Hawkeye ventured, unsure of her words even as she said them.

She’d only spent any length of time with him the once, when Miller put them on guard duty together and Vale made her take shots at targets to see how good she was. He’d been fine then – attentive to the business at hand, but also a real person, who was coping with the task by lying to himself. Maybe he’d lied so long telling himself that the Ishvalans deserved it, that now he thought it was the truth. They’d never really spoken like that again. Some people just didn’t make light conversation, and a lot of the time Hawkeye was one of those people, too. If anyone was the person to draw him out of himself, it was not her.

She fingered the stock of her rifle, letting the smooth, polished wood anchor her. “He wants this war to be over as much as any one of us – he just does his part in a different way.”

Isaac’s ration tins rattled as he put lids back on, and he let out a puff of air. “Yeah. Well, we need people like that if this is ever going to end. I just hope he’s sane.”

Hawkeye scoffed. “He’s sane. He’s just … different.”

She felt Isaac’s gaze on her – could see him in her peripheral vision looking right at her. A flicker of her eyes over to him took in the weird tension in his mouth, the slackness of his cheeks. No smile, now. He looked at her with pity, but at the same time she struggled to find the glint that he usually had about him, or the lightness that was once there.

“You’re different,” he said.

“We’ve all changed,” she replied.

Voices rose behind them and the sound of gunshots rang out, shattering the reverie.

\---

Mustang watched the truck leaving enviously. Two soldiers sat in the front, faces twisted in distaste, and he was sure that the smell must be horrendous, but he would drive that truck back and forth all day collecting corpses of his comrades to get out of here for a moment.

Armstrong, he noticed, was having a similar moment on the other side of the road, fixated on the vehicle as it bumped away filled with dead soldiers.

“You’re not thinking of taking off, are you?” Mustang asked, strolling into the middle of the road to approach the man.

Armstrong’s great eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“Would you be in the front or the back?”

The air seemed to leave the enormous man, and something like a laugh came out of him. “Oh, no. Although I’m sure there’s room in there for someone of your size.”

“Oh yes, my size,” Mustang sighed, mindful of how long it had been since he’d had time to do any sort of exercise beyond walking all day and snapping his fingers. His lean, weedy frame was dwarfed by Armstrong’s bulk. The man was a bodybuilding masterpiece, even in the middle of the desert – but he seemed like he was made of porcelain, hollow and brittle.

Armstrong rubbed at his upper lip, suppressing what may have been the beginnings of a smile or a frown. “What do you think they do with the bodies when they get back to camp?”

“They’d have to bury them. Or freeze them to stop the smell attracting animals.” Which was fairly possible, with one of the alchemists in the region.

“Straight away,” Armstrong murmured.

Of course, corpses weren’t the only things the trucks transported. They’d come to the front lines bearing fresh rations, stock ordered by the quartermasters, and every now and then the mail that had arrived – and sometimes instead of leaving stocked full of corpses they’d take injured soldiers who were being sent home, outgoing mail, or broken equipment that may be repaired and shouldn’t fall into enemy hands. How they decided what was most urgent to take, Mustang didn’t know, because so many of those bodies had been laying out for much too long. It was probably just a matter of if the drivers could bear the stench of their countrymen that day.

“There really ought to be some sort of schedule they follow,” he said, and Armstrong echoed his sentiment with a ‘hmm’.

As one, they eyed the Sergeant Major who had sent the trucks off on their way. He clutched at a notepad, pencil skimming across the surface as he noted the cargo that had just left and what had been left behind for the next load. The man wore a handkerchief tied around his face in an attempt to keep the smell out.

Armstrong strode off towards the Sergeant Major and bellowed out a greeting that made the smaller man jump. “When can we expect a mail pick up? Surely not in the same loads as the departed!”

The idea of his paltry letters reaching Central with the stench of his countrymen still on them made Mustang grimace. No, he’d be very happy for them to travel in a separate load as well.

There could be a formula to determine how long the smell would last. He found himself considering the chemistry and physics behind it – alchemy was simply applied science, after all, and he’d been inundated with theories and formulae throughout his apprenticeship. As he thought, he slipped his hands into his pockets where the fingers of one hand brushed against the rough material of his gloves. He found the thread of the array – small, close stitches he’d laboured at for hours to get right. Alchemy had really only become about one thing in the war; he didn’t even have to draw arrays any more, now that he had them stitched on his gloves. The last time he’d had to draw his own array was perhaps a year ago, months before he’d even been sent to join the war.

He drew his hands back out of his pockets, and wandered on to find a pencil and some paper, eager to lose himself in theory for a while.


	14. Chapter Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know when you're writing a scene and you realise you have to set it up better, so it turns into an arc instead? That's what happened here. I now know the arc will be at least four chapters (maybe five), starting from the previous one (Chapter Twelve), and it covers some things I started planning around when I was writing Chapter Two. I think the big wait between then and now may have given me a need to 'set the scene', or just make clear a lot of background to the actual event that I wanted to make sure came across properly, because I've spent so much time thinking about it that I had to make sure it worked. Each chapter still has its own important things - there are no 'filler' bits - but there's just so much going on that I couldn't cut scenes short enough for regular chapter length, and bigger chapters = longer waits between.

Isaac kicked over his tins as he frantically pulled his firearm up into readiness, and Hawkeye turned to see Ishvalans crowding on the other side of the long street Colonel Grand had opened up. Guns flashed from doorways and windows of houses that hadn’t been flattened, right in the empty stretch where Vale was meant to be. Stupid man with his wandering! He’d gone so far he’d left a hole in their defences this time.

While Grand pummelled the ground, setting up spiked barriers for his men to take cover behind, Hawkeye began taking aim at their attackers. Their gunmen had made good cover inside the houses – which had been checked by Grand’s platoon before they paused for rest. They must have come in through a window, snaking through the alleyways that Vale was meant to be watching, circumventing him or taking cover in buildings if he passed them. There were three houses where gunmen perched in the shadows, letting off a proper volley of bullets at Grand’s defences.

The gaps between the houses were filling with handfuls of people, too, with nothing to give them cover, only holding simple weapons – clubs, knives, a garden spade. They called out, jeering at the Amestrians hiding behind the alchemised wall, and looking like a mob ready to riot. As far as she could tell, they were held back only by the crossfire. They would be problematic if fire ceased and they began to charge, but for now the greatest threat were the firearms. Hawkeye left the melee to the soldiers with less precise weaponry, and zeroed in on the higher risk problem.

Next to her, Isaac was useless. His gun was not made for accuracy at these distances, and if he left the cover of the rooftop’s ledge to get closer, he would be in open range for the enemy, likely for twenty seconds – a long time to be out of safety. Hawkeye could feel his nervous energy as he tried to figure out what to do. He was a squad leader separated from his squad, but returning to them was too dangerous to attempt.

“Watch my back,” she ordered him between shots. “Make sure no-one joins them from behind us.”

“Right!” He crawled around behind her to look down on the alleys she had been watching. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about being killed without warning; he’d be able to take care of anyone that came close, and warn if he needed help.

Vision set firmly on the targets she was taking down, Hawkeye couldn’t fully ignore the blue uniformed soldiers who had fallen before the defences went up, and replayed what had happened as the ambush was executed. There was yelling first: someone had seen the Ishvalans getting into place, and had raised the alarm. Then there was gunfire: the Ishvalans began shooting, maybe some Amestrians were shooting, too. It was an ambush, but only half-ready when they had to begin – if the enemy had been fully in place, they would have been able to take out Colonel Grand first, and the rest of the soldiers would have been easy targets as they ran for cover. As it was, they’d managed to kill or seriously injure at least four soldiers from an already small platoon.

The Amestrians were regrouping behind the spiked walls, taking blind pot shots at the Ishvalans that weren’t really hitting anything. It was better than nothing, and Hawkeye was grateful for the cover it provided for her as she lined up her targets. She noted more than one set of Ishvalan eyes scanning the rooves for snipers, but they couldn’t stand in the open and look intently when they were also being fired upon by multiple sources.

Movement in the mob gathered between the two houses nearest her caught Hawkeye’s attention as the people there bunched back against the walls, clutching their useless melee weapons close. A woman burst forward, scarf tied around her head and thick hair streaming behind her. Hawkeye swung her rifle to the new target as the woman’s arm spun and released something – a grenade. It arced up and came down on the top edge of Grand’s wall, at an angle that sent it back into the street instead of over towards its target.

The sound of the explosion overwhelmed everything else for a short moment, the soundscape altering as dust and debris blew out. From her distance, Hawkeye recovered fairly quickly – it was an open space, and the energy dissipated quickly. A quick scan showed no-one particularly affected: the Ishvalans were far enough away that it seemed they’d evaded the shrapnel, and the Amestrians were protected enough by the wall – although a puff of dust seemed to indicate some cracks in the defences. The woman had disappeared back into the Ishvalans in the alleyway, who bristled with defiance. A grenade that made it over the wall would not have such a quick recovery.

As Hawkeye tried to recalculate the targets’ priority – active shooters, or people creating a defence for the bombardier – the sparks of alchemy rose around Grand’s wall, pushing the spikes out so they bristled like a porcupine going into defence-mode. The ground rippled and rumbled, and the wall rushed towards the Ishvalans in the alleyway, who scattered as it came smashing against the buildings, blocking them in. A second wall rose up for the soldiers before the first had fully exposed them to the gunfire ahead.

Hawkeye went back to the gunners, now the others were blocked off. One didn’t duck back far enough after he’d taken his shot, and she managed to drop him while he reloaded. There was a flurry of activity as they all retreated from the window, and she caught sight of movement behind her target’s slumped body – light appearing where it hadn’t been. She tried to watch it as she waited for the next person to come forward, and realised that it was a window she hadn’t noticed before, which had been hidden behind a person she didn’t realise was there. The light disappeared – a silhouette moving over it – and she pulled the trigger too late as her target ducked out of the way. A hiss escaped her mouth at the irritation of the missed shot, but even more so as she realised the Ishvalans were retreating, creeping out of the window and moving back through the alleys.

Why wasn’t Colonel Grand attacking? She tore her eyes from the enemy for a moment to see what was happening behind his wall, and grimaced. A pair of soldiers were lined up at the edges of the wall Grand had made, shooting blindly into the diminishing Ishvalan fire. A soldier sat up against the wall, a bloody hand clasped to his chest – Hawkeye couldn’t tell whether the blood came from his hand or from his chest, but he was ignored while the only other two soldiers huddled around Grand, fussing over the gauntlets that bore Grand’s alchemical arrays.

Of course when they were sent out on a mission with a renowned alchemist he’d somehow been put out of action. But he wasn’t dead. There was some problem, but he’d be able to fix it if she and her team were able to get them back to the camp.

She grit her teeth and looked back to the Ishvalans in time to register something flying at her. Even as she jerked back, it struck her just behind her temple, and she spun and dropped to the ground gasping. The moment she reached the safety of full cover, her fingers scrambled to touch the point of contact – a stinging cut behind her hairline, not a bullet in her head.

Isaac spun from his view of the alleys, his face paling as he took in her hand to her head. He yelled something and scrambled towards her, crawling low beneath the small cover they had.

Her heart beat loudly in her ears, a pounding loud enough to drown out the insistence of the itching on her neck. The sting flared as she patted at it, trying to gauge its depth. Maybe four fingers long, a thin cut – not too deep.

Isaac pried her hand away from her head, looming over her as he peered at it. She twisted her head to see if he was properly behind cover, but he hissed, “Don’t move!” as his fingers slipped through the blood in her hair.

“I’m fine,” she said, trying to push his hands away, and only making him yank on her hair.

He was working away at untangling something, and made a satisfied noise as it came free. “Some chipped clay – that’s all.” The piece he held out to her was sharp and bloody, but most definitely not a bullet. “They must have missed you and got the building.”

Thank goodness for that – a bullet in the head would have been disastrous. She’d be better off dying in a grenade blast than from a headshot.

The rooftop suddenly felt very small and trapping.

“We need to get away from their line of sight,” Hawkeye said as she evaluated whether there was anywhere on this rooftop that she could shoot from without becoming a target again.

Isaac’s head swivelled as though he was trying to see through their solid cover. “Why hasn’t Grand done something about it?”

“He was alive a minute ago, but it looked like something was wrong. We can’t count on him to save us.”

“I just need a look at the situation,” he muttered.

“If you stick your head up, you’ll get shot,” she warned, feeling at the gash on her head. It wasn’t that bad, really – the reminder of her mortality was the worst part of it.

Isaac didn’t respond, and Hawkeye glanced at him. He was eyeing the ledge on the opposite side of the roof, where he’d been guarding the alley below. They couldn’t roof-hop to the sides to find a building with stairs if it took them out into the open, but the Ishvalans hadn’t been taking shots at Isaac when he was overlooking the alley – that way could be safe enough.

Isaac met her gaze and gave a haphazard shrug. “If we go over at the same time, it gives them less chance to aim for us.” He paused. “You think you can do this?”

She glared at him.

“Right. Well, it’s only one floor, so we slide over, then hang and drop.”

She slung her rifle over her shoulder and they crawled on their bellies to the far side of the building, where the angle was narrowest for the Ishvalans to get any sight of them. After a count of three they scuffled over the ledge, Hawkeye’s cheek scraping the clay as she tried to keep ducked as low as possible. A leg braced on the ledge helped ease the weight into her arms so she didn’t slip and fall as she slid over the side, and in a matter of seconds she’d dropped to the ground and was straightening up from a crouch. Her head whipped around so fast checking for enemies that she was surprised she didn’t pull something in her neck.

The alley was shadowy – much narrower than the road Grand and his platoon were on, even before he’d widened it – but there was no debris to hide behind, only the gaps between houses, and no movement apart from them. The sounds of the battle on the street parallel seemed like an invasion in the quiet, still street, and her heart hammered at being out in the relative open. A fight in partial- or full-cover was an entirely different game to one in the open – if an Ishvalan came into the alleyway with guns blazing, Hawkeye would have to move quickly to have any effect.

The gunshots out there were less frequent. Fewer men standing, maybe. Or the Ishvalans could all have escaped and the Amestrians were left trying to return fire that wasn’t coming. How would they know when to stop? She needed a vantage point.

Hawkeye tried to recall how much further along Miller had been, and when she last saw him. If the Ishvalans were shooting at her, they’d be looking for him as well. What a mess – at least two out of three snipers completely out of position. If he was still there, he’d be a prime target, without Hawkeye and Vale distracting the Ishvalans. At least the men on the ground were still shooting. Yes, she could take strength in their fire because it meant a shield for her team, too.

With Isaac at her back, Hawkeye sidled along the alleyway, ducking her head and rifle around the gaps between houses before they darted across. As their view of the battle diminished, she started evaluating the houses they went past, and how much cover they seemed to provide.

She looked for handholds as she went, a route to get up a wall, when footsteps to her left startled her. Hawkeye spun around as an Ishvalan came out of another alleyway, seeming just as surprised to see them. She barely had time to register his knife before Isaac dropped him with a quick hit to the chest. The man fell to the ground, gasping, and with one more shot to the head he was dead.

It was gruesome. The blood spray, the splatter over the walls. Something felt different about it when it was up close.

But she was alive. “Thanks,” she breathed.

Isaac nudged her. “Keep going.”

“No, we’ll go up here,” Hawkeye said, turning back to look up at the house she’d been observing.

The gun barrel appeared above her so quickly that her knees just about buckled as she tried to swing her rifle up, and Isaac made a sound like he was choking.

Behind the barrel, Miller’s eyes went from hard to relieved in only a moment. The gun was turned aside, and Hawkeye lowered her own, letting out the breath she’d been holding in a ragged burst. Death really was only a second away, here – it was all luck. Did you hear your enemy before they heard you? Did your ally recognise you before they pulled the trigger?

“Get up quick, then,” Miller snapped, slipping his head back over the roof.

Isaac stood watch for any more Ishvalans while Hawkeye climbed up onto a window ledge. The wall was mostly smooth, but a stone jutted out just far enough to act as a handhold above her. With the help of the stone, she stemmed her way up the window and got an arm over the roof’s ledge. Miller unceremoniously grabbed the back of her uniform and helped haul her over. A moment later, Isaac got the same treatment as he made his way up the wall, and soon they were all up together, Miller crawling back into his spot and Hawkeye taking the vantage point in the adjacent corner.

The fight was a different one from the one Hawkeye had left – “About bloody time,” Miller growled. Vale had appeared somewhere in the interim, recently it seemed, and was standing cocksure on a roof, looming over the Ishvalans in an alley as he picked them off. Hawkeye scanned for any remaining fighters in the houses, but they were all still. There was no movement in the alleys – those who had been running off had either escaped or been caught by Vale as he made his way back to the position he’d abandoned.

The only movement she noted was at Grand’s wall, where the soldiers were starting to venture out from their positions. When there was no attack, they went to their fallen comrades to check on them. Grand had shaken off the soldiers who had been fussing over his gauntlets, and Hawkeye could now see a smear of blood over his arm, although she couldn’t tell whether it was his. Just another thing that went wrong – if Grand had been shot and died, it would have been more than just the lives of the men here. Fewer alchemists meant a slower war, and every day they were here more Amestrians died.

Miller’s ominous growling burst into speech, with a “-cking _mess_ ,” his volume fluctuating as he kept on snarling to himself. “Could have all _died_ because of him w- … Enough.” He blew a great gust of breath through his moustache and turned his glare on Hawkeye and Isaac. “ _You_ stay here and protect the men on the ground. If you so much as stir from that spot, you’d better have the scars to prove it wasn’t for your _own personal excursion_.”

“Of course, sir,” she said, Isaac echoing her.

Miller’s eyes flickered to the blood in her hair, and he snorted another breath through his moustache. He was mollified enough by her blood to give Isaac a curt nod, and pried his hands out of fists long enough to slip his rifle over his shoulder and scale down the side of the house.

The mission had just been to widen the road for an attack later. There wasn’t meant to be any engagement with the enemy, just general protection duty. Hawkeye turned back to the outer streets, turning her back on Miller as he stormed across to Vale. Isaac watched from the other corner, adding his eyes to her makeshift watchtower, and they sat in silence with the tension numbed by the intensity of the task they were undertaking.

Vale was not the hero that his numbers told. Hawkeye had been considering that thought for some time now, and felt the sureness of it spreading in her chest as she kept her eyes out for movement. The numbers lied: not only were they a terrible thing in and of themselves, but there was no differentiating between a fighter and a civilian, an adult and a child. There was no sense of how many Amestrians faced how many Ishvalans – or of how they were lured in and killed. There was no record attached to those numbers of how many Amestrians were endangered in the process of getting each kill, and if there was then perhaps Vale would hold the record for that as well. This, it seemed, was the culmination of all of his wandering – off in a world of his own, searching out his own enemy instead of guarding the men who were counting on them. When he went out of position, he abandoned them all, and he did it all the time – though never as far as this time. He was eager for the fight, seeking his own glory, and doing little to help the individuals of the military except where it benefited him.

And Miller! As enraged as he was about this mission – this one mission, where something had finally gone wrong – his lax leadership and dismissiveness of danger could only have contributed to Vale’s sense that he could leave his duty to pursue his own goals. Hawkeye stared out into the streets, remembering Miller’s derision of hierarchy and wondering whether he still thought the concept of authority was ridiculous.

Considering the might of military justice, today’s infringement should culminate in Vale being court-marshalled. Yesterday’s infringement and all the ones before should have had him put to camp duties long before this had ever happened – cooking, helping the quartermaster, admin assistance – but none of those had ever come about. Miller had let Vale’s risky behaviour slide instead, bringing them to this point.

She didn’t know what she thought. She was alive, and so were most of the men they came with. That’s what she knew. The same sense of duty – of hierarchy and respect for authority – that pinned one person to their station in readiness for a battle, also was the reason why they had to fight that battle in the first place. There had to be an alternative to the terrible tactics the Brigadier General employed in his fight for the region, but to search for her own way to conclude the battle she’d be putting the men to her left and right at risk, just as Vale had.

But for now, she was alive, and the Ishvalans were the ones who were dead. And she hated how thankful she was for that.

\---

Mustang had come across a team made up of the Ishvalan warrior priests today. The rebels fought alongside their religious leaders, guns and muscle working together to duck and weave in and out of buildings. The small streets worked to their advantage as they used the area to evade his notice, and make quick shots at him and his team – but Mustang was ready with fingers poised, on edge as he saw how rattled the soldiers around him were.

It was too narrow a place for them to be so far from backup. They were like sheep, being herded away from the rest of the flock, so that they could be harried and worn down before finally succumbing.

His fingers were long past callused these days, nestled in soft gloves that were the least abrasive fabric he could make that would still be able to produce a spark. Rayon and asbestos – what a pairing. Rubbing his fingers in these gloves all day, clicking and snapping, was sure to roughen up his skin. He was grateful for it today. If he hadn’t already built up his calluses his fingertips would have been raw and bleeding.

The Ishvalans were so quick – not holding their ground, but dancing around like targets at a country fair. He snapped and sent a gust of flame down the side of a house to ward off anyone coming near. They could be just around the corner, waiting to pop around, and he would have been useless. He was still getting the hang of corners; air didn’t naturally change direction at a right-angle.

He saw a soldier stumble back, and before he even saw the Ishvalan priest charging, Mustang sent out a burst of flame, meeting a yelp that told him he’d aimed well, but not well enough. He performed the calculation quickly in his head and engaged the array for a moment longer than usual, drawing in more fuel so when he snapped again the explosion was big enough to engulf the retreating man.

The Amestrians kept on their toes, not only watching out for the next attack, but scouting for where the Ishvalans may have hidden in ambush for later. They were tired and more than ready to go back to camp, but on edge in readiness for the next attack. Better to take them all out now and go home without the enemy at your back than to let them keep on coming at you.

They searched in the surrounding houses, through the streets and alleys, and there was no-one there. No attack came back at them. All they could do was turn around and head back for their food and bed so they were in relative safety by the time night fell.

Mustang eyed the shadows as they made their own retreat, waiting for a bullet to catch him in the chest, or for a priest to bring him to his reckoning. They were only still. Still, but full of eyes watching the soldiers tramp through land that wasn’t theirs, killing men and women who would never leave this place again – who would stand as silent witnesses to the horrors that happened here. The spirit of a nation hovered here, looking down on the soldiers that did their gruesome duty and growing thicker as each life was extinguished.

One day he wouldn’t see the man with the gun, or the knife in the shadows, and what would happen then? When he died, would he join the spirits of the dead here, or would they devour him as rightful retribution for what he had done?

They made it back to camp, all alive and only some wounded. Perhaps it was a new tactic the Ishvalans were trying: out-dancing the Amestrians. Their numbers must have been running small now, so many years into the war. There was only so long they could last in open-combat, but by stepping in and out of the fight they could test and prod and exhaust the Amestrians until they were ready to lay down their weapons. Mustang already felt exhausted. He couldn’t imagine how long they would be able to keep this up.


	15. Chapter Fourteen

The next morning, they regrouped. Once again, they would go out broadening a promenade for military trucks and weaponry, and again and again until the job was done or they’d all died in the attempt, probably. A platoon of twelve men had been reduced to seven yesterday. With the snipers and Colonel Grand, they hobbled home, leaving three dead and carrying two wounded. They’d collect the dead today. How they were supposed to do that with so few men, Hawkeye didn’t know – it was too risky sending a truck along at this stage, when it made such a perfect target for attack and they didn’t have the numbers to protect themselves well enough, let alone the target a vehicle made.

The answer appeared as she noted the men gathering for the mission. She had arrived early rather than wait around at the camp among off duty soldiers, and perched herself on a crumbling wall near the meeting point. They came in full squads – five or six at a time, new faces that hadn’t been there yesterday. There were maybe thirty in all, a proper full platoon. She’d seen them before – around the camp, maybe on a mission she couldn’t remember – but they weren’t Colonel Grand’s platoon. The thought crossed her mind that she was in the wrong place, or another mission was also going out from here, but before it gained any real traction Lieutenant Miller was bringing up the rear, talking with a man she recognised vaguely as an alchemist. Isaac’s platoon had been swapped out. Even Colonel Grand had been swapped out for someone else.

She looked the alchemist up and down, trying to remember what she could about him, but this one she knew little about beyond his title – the Fossorial Alchemist – and a vague idea that his alchemy was particularly good with earthworks. He was a wiry, middle-aged man, with long brown hair and glasses. He looked like the sort of alchemist to smell of books and rotting parchment – he even had a ratty old journal in one hand. It made her uneasy. A researcher, not a fighter.

The alchemist looked unimpressed by whatever Miller was saying to him. Gestures the older man made between his State Alchemist watch and the gathering men went unnoticed as Miller scanned the crowd.

Hawkeye slipped off the wall and made her way closer so she could be seen without intruding on the conversation, a silent form of reporting to her commanding officer.

“Cadet?”

The female voice surprised her – there were so few of them around that they really stood out. Hawkeye turned to see Dove Langley, one of the few other combat specialists among the women. Dove held her hand out to Hawkeye.

“Corporal,” Hawkeye said, closing the gap between them to shake Dove’s outstretched hand.

“Are you here alone?”

Hawkeye shook her head and gestured back to Miller. “My team is on the mission today. There are three of us.” Still – even after yesterday.

“I don’t mean on the mission.” Dove peered at her with sharp eyes.

Hawkeye took in the other woman’s tension. “Oh – Petrova found me the first day out. There are four of us bunking together.” She hesitated to ask. “And you?”

But Dove’s tension was starting to fade away. She gestured at her platoon. “We’ve just transferred up from further down the line. I have Thomas with me, and he’s enough to discourage any unwanted attention.” Dove caught the eye of a solid-looking man milling around not too far away, exchanging smiles before she turned back.

Hawkeye nodded, relieved. Dove was one of the women who had taken on a lover here as a form of protection – and, seemingly, with some real affection, too. There were all sorts of rules about relationships within a chain of command, but seeing someone who was the same rank but in a different squad was perfectly fine. If either of them were promoted to platoon leader, they’d have to hope the leadership was too busy with the war to care, and from the stories Hawkeye had heard, they definitely were. All those rules about chains of command had become a matter for military headquarters, not for the battlefield – and even then, there were some blind spots.

A change in Dove’s stance drew Hawkeye’s attention around, and she saw that Miller and the Fossorial alchemist had parted ways, Vale approaching the Lieutenant. He was late.

“Were you on the mission yesterday?” Dove asked as the platoon shifted, ready for their commander.

“Yes.”

“I heard it was a bust.”

Hawkeye paused, a million things on her tongue: she was where she was meant to be, so it wasn’t her fault; they got Colonel Grand back safely, so their mission had been accomplished; it wasn’t as bad as it could have been if the Ishvalans got a grenade over Grand’s wall; she followed all of her orders; if it had been up to her, Vale would have been sent as far away from the front lines as he could be. But they were all about to head back into the field, and Dove didn’t want to hear a list of excuses or complaints. She wanted to know that she would come back alive today, just like everyone else did.

“It was,” she admitted, “but we will do our best to finish the job today.”

It was nothing – neither comfort nor complaint – but at least it wasn’t lowering Dove’s confidence in the ability of those watching over her. There was certain to be enough talk around camp doing that already.

There weren’t many soldiers who came back to camp with Colonel Grand yesterday, but each one of them would have been offered a sympathetic place at a fire, and a chance to tell what happened. The fighting they engaged in – the comrades they lost – and what they’d overheard. Piece it all together with the fact that Vale was still here, still on combat duty with all of the rest of them, and it made a very interesting story on multiple fronts.

Miller had been furious. Hawkeye had heard him complain about superior officers, the chain of command, any sort of hierarchy – and so on – but she had never before heard him speak a disparaging word to or about the average soldier until he exploded at Vale, in full hearing-range of all of the soldiers as they made their way back to the camp. Not only were they still in dangerous territory at the time, where his tirade could have drawn down Ishvala’s own fury on them, but it had been revelatory. And humiliating.

They’d yelled at each other like poorly trained dogs as they passed in the street – loud and full of barely restrained fight. Her commanding officer and comrade, making a scene where anyone could pick them off. Miller tore into Vale in front of the men they had been protecting, laying the blame for their friends’ deaths at his careless feet, and naming him every foul epithet Hawkeye had heard Miller use only in reference to Fessler before. Vale drew into question Miller’s own talent as a sniper, as though it was an affront that his own commanding officer was a sub-par specialist when he himself was the cream of the crop.

The lack of professionalism in her teammates had been embarrassing enough – that the soldiers returning to camp might think the team as a whole was constantly fighting and unable to do their jobs properly. She was professional. She was protecting them – even as the others argued, she had been keeping watch to make sure no-one was approaching. It had been embarrassing enough before her name came into it.

_“A better sniper, are you? But a worse soldier. In fact, Hawkeye might have you beaten on both fronts there, if you give her enough time.”_

Her whole body had reacted, shoulders stiffening and toes curling, knowing that there could be no good outcome from this, and before the grimace had fully formed on her face, Vale was already loudly declaring some less complimentary things that she may be more talented at, too.

She’d never tried to have a totally clean reputation, but specificity of the accusation made her cheeks go red. More so when a soldier ahead of her turned around to look. The moment had passed quickly – Miller rounding back at Vale with a jab that had nothing to do with Hawkeye – and the fight remained just as juvenile, but now that she’d been drawn into their argument, she knew she’d be tarred with whatever same brush they were. And yes, she’d expected the comparison between them to incite some bitterness, but to hear that it was already there, insinuations about her at the tip of Vale’s tongue, was insightful in the most disappointing of ways.

Grand had stepped in to stop them, when it seemed that nothing else would, the alchemist’s voice gripping them like a vice, bringing it to a close not long after Miller said something else that made Hawkeye’s ears perk up:

_“If it wasn’t for Fessler, you’d be gone already.”_

Vale was a nobody. Completely unconnected, as far as she knew. He was no-one’s favourite nephew or cousin to be kept around through his dangerous misdeeds. He was just a sniper who did a particularly good job of killing and, it seemed, a particularly bad job of protecting. It made no sense. Why would a Brigadier General keep someone in the field whose insubordination was dangerous to those around him? Was it because of his ranking on the killboard? That ranking certainly gained him a lot of respect from other soldiers, but it was no reason to offer him immunity from discipline.

Even Colonel Grand’s intervention didn’t stop Miller and Vale bickering on the way back, albeit at a lower level, and when her name was raised and disparaged again, Hawkeye realised that what had happened today had been brewing for weeks.

Vale, it seemed, had been trying to prove himself this whole time. His reckless searching for a fight with the enemy was some effort to make himself stand out – the short, shaggy-haired man who was wiry and physically unexceptional, looking to be top dog in this testosterone-fuelled pocket of the world. Part of that had been not just ignoring, but actively avoiding Hawkeye because of the threat she posed to his reputation. Not because she was also an excellent sniper, but because that one time – that _one time_ – they’d been on duty together, his work ethic had been called into question.

He wanted respect, just like she did, but he didn’t want it from her. He wanted it from the loud, jeering idiots who had no respect to give – and who only respected might.

Since they’d been on guard duty together, she realised, he had been in the trio with her, or not at all. He would accompany Miller when required, but if it seemed like he might be paired with Hawkeye he would always volunteer for solo duty, taking higher risks and going further than needed. She hadn’t noticed it as unusual at the time, because there was no normal yet. He’d been distant when she first joined the team, and there had been some vague inklings of friendship growing before the incident that caused him to push away again. She’d just put it down to his erratic personality.

Miller had wanted to assign Vale flanking duty as punishment for causing the deaths of Amestrian soldiers. Considering the fury that had blasted out of him in unclaimed territory, the closer they got to camp the more it petered out into nothingness. Fessler, apparently, wouldn’t allow Vale to be removed entirely, so flanking duty was the best way to relieve him of the duties his ego wanted.

And so the soldiers returned to camp with stories to tell of ambush and death, with a side of bitter injustice and the shambolic relations of the sniper team – social _and_ sexual.

Hawkeye wondered how many were stewing on the idea that Fessler was keeping a liability on the field. How many remembered Vale’s flat out refusal to flank her as his punishment, or Miller’s capitulating to Vale’s request to flank him instead. How many looked at her and saw her as an equal and capable member of the sniper team, and how many thought that all she was good for were the things Vale was shouting about her. She wondered what they brought back to camp, and shared with the rest of the brigade over the campfires and meagre rations.

She wondered what Dove had heard.

She didn’t ask. They parted without further ado – Dove to her squad leader and Hawkeye to find what orders Miller had for the team today. Miller grimly met her gaze as she approached, while Vale turned his head away. It wasn’t all that different to how it had been before, but now she could recognise his indifference as intentional. Yesterday she had been uncertain of Vale’s protection, if she’d ever need it. Now she knew that she couldn’t count on it.

“We’ll have a back-up squad today,” Miller spat.

Hawkeye took in his scowl and gritted teeth, and knew that the question he had answered for himself was whether the squad would be their protectors or their babysitters. They’d been given protective squads many times before, and this could really be no different. It felt different.

Vale’s head inclined at the news, like a puppy raising one ear hopefully, only for Miller to snap at him, “You’re still on flanking duty.”

Vale’s head sank back into neutrality.

\---

Being sent home on leave was an unobtainable goal at the moment. Mustang hadn’t served his full year yet, so he didn’t warrant any, but even listening to men who had been here longer, it seemed that all leave had been put on pause for the duration of the Daliha advance. Men who had been talking in longing voices of seeing home once again had now sunk into the relentlessness of a job that had to be completed before they saw their reward. Although ‘reward’ was a weak word to use for a person’s chance to see their home briefly before they shipped out once more.

He'd not been offered the chance to go home to family, but the wording he’d been given for his current destination implied some sort of break. It was a lie. Sure, a break from the intensity of the danger in the city and the possibility of attack on every side, but a return to those broken faces begging for mercy.

The camp on the hill was its own different sort of hell.

The soldiers accompanying him were reasonably relieved by the release from front-line duty, as well they should be. He didn’t fault them that. They would be helping keep this easily defensible area in Amestrian hands – an important, but much calmer duty than walking out into Ishvalan streets day after day.

His days would be spent mostly inside the fortress. Two weeks of prison and prisoners.

He stepped out of the truck, so intent on ignoring the fortress until he had to report there tomorrow that he was surprised by the reception they were given. A platoon of soldiers were there already – the soldiers they were here to replace, who would be headed into the city with the rest of the brigade. They were stony-faced, knowing they were headed back into danger, and he felt a measure of guilt for his part in it.

One man alone looked refreshed by his time away from the front lines, and ready to be on his way.

“Welcome back to camp,” the Crimson Alchemist said lightly, arching an eyebrow at Mustang and the men who filed out of the truck behind him.

The small smile on his face irked Mustang, but he shook the man’s hand when he held it out anyway. Two weeks out here and he looked as refreshed as someone returning from a day spa.

Mustang hadn’t had much to do with Kimblee before. They’d met in small moments when alchemists congregated, and a few times before Order 3066 had come into play, but otherwise alchemists typically saw as much of each other as they chose, and neither had any reason to seek out the other. The relaxed slant of his shoulders was what really got to him – this man had one of the highest turnover rates for men in his platoon, and yet his shoulders sat without tension, like someone who carried nothing with him from the past few months.

Mustang considered waving him off as he left – yes, begone from here – but at the same time he lamented the loss of someone to talk to. Kimblee was weird, and not great at protecting his men on the battlefield, but from the snatches Mustang had heard, he was a philosopher of sorts. It would be interesting to hear what a man like that had to say about the war.

He was just looking for any sort of hope. And any distraction from the fortress he’d be dealing with for the next two weeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote out the entire argument between Miller and Vale and I hate it, so I didn't include it. I hope the oblique references to it were at least understandable.


	16. Chapter Fifteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I rewrote the start of this chapter at least three times before I told myself I didn't have to get it out fast for some sort of self-proscribed schedule that I was always late for anyway. That gave me a lot more space to finish this arc in a way I was happy with. So, while this isn't the last chapter of the arc, the arc is done and in a way where I got to spend time making sure it worked.

The Fossorial Alchemist’s approach was beyond any Hawkeye had experienced before – of all her vantage points over Ishval, ‘below’ was not one she’d yet encountered. The tunnel he made for them stretched from the edge of the Amestrian camp, underneath enemy territory that only appeared here through corners of exposed building foundation when the ceiling of the tunnel rose too high. Earth moved itself out of their way at the command of his transmutations, leaving a rough but flat floor and an arched path with a ceiling a metre or so above their heads for good measure. It could have been mistaken for a mining tunnel, if the supports for the ceiling were wooden posts instead of buttresses carved from the earth itself.

Every second soldier was wielding their flashlight, lighting up the path ahead. The soft yellow light was broken momentarily by the blue flash of transmutation every time Fossorial paused to extend the tunnel, the earth ahead of them melting away as though it were excavating itself.

Hawkeye held tight to her rifle and watched him press an array-covered page of his battered journal to the wall. After each extension, he narrowed the path behind them, pulling the walls in so that only two could walk abreast on the journey back. That was a precaution she could have done without. Strategically, it seemed a weak defence against any Ishvalans who invaded the tunnels – they weren’t a military, attacking in formation, so they weren’t likely to try storming the camp with soldiers bursting out en masse. The image burst into her mind of a lone Ishvalan running out to the tunnel entrance and pitching a grenade into the Amestrian camp as her hair streamed behind her. That was the Ishvalan combat strategy: hit quick and dart back into cover.

Whatever she thought of the defensive efficacy of the tunnel behind them narrowing, there was still a glimmer of relief that it wasn’t closed completely. It would be safer to close it, but this way if anything happened to the alchemist – or that old journal with all of his arrays – the platoon wouldn’t have to dig themselves out of their own mass grave.

As best as Hawkeye could tell in this sunless hole, it had been twenty minutes walking in an almost-straight line and stopping for the alchemist to do his work, when the platoon’s lieutenant brought them to a halt. A corporal was commandeered to shine his light on the lieutenant’s map while the officers conversed over it.

Hawkeye looked askance at the soldier next to her.

“We’re about to head up,” he said, and pointed at his face. “Better put your day-time eyes in, cadet.”

“What?”

He nodded, eyebrows raised and corners of his mouth twitching. “It’s bright up there, baby-soldier. You’re gonna pop up out of here blind as a bat if you don’t get some sparkle in there ahead of time.” He swirled his flashlight around so the beam danced over her face, leaving her blinking and recoiling.

“Knock it off, Nelson,” another soldier said.

Nelson shrugged, and in the gloom past him, Hawkeye couldn’t tell whether the other soldier was just blinking, or winking at her. She quickly ‘noticed’ Miller and Vale on the other side of the tunnel and made her way back to her team.

Her steps dawdled as she neared. For a moment she’d felt like she was gravitating towards the people who treated her like a professional, but no, it was just swapping one soldier’s unwelcome flirting for another’s bitter resentment.

For a man who should have had a much more severe punishment, Vale seemed contrite today – not towards her, and not at all cognisant of the effects of his behaviour, but there was a definite deference towards his commanding officer that had up to now been patchy at best. He seemed aware that some level of obedience was required today. On the trip out he had doggedly followed Miller’s steps, head swivelling in search of danger as though he were the only one who could spot it – as though it were imminent even here, underground. It was an odd image that reminded Hawkeye of their first mission, when Miller and Vale had been so in sync with one another, creeping through broken streets and past Ishvalan camps, swapping roles as needed to keep each other safe. How long it had been at that point, since they lost their other teammate? Was the danger fresh and clear in their minds, or had time bred that reliance on each other? There was no swapping now: Miller kept Vale at his heel, face stony and moustache bristling.

They were keeping tense company with one another when she joined them – no cross-communication with the adjoining platoon or even the squad that seemed to be their collective tail. Miller’s expression almost made her turn away from them and go somewhere else. She didn’t trust his capacity to maintain his cool among so many people, and if he was going to blow up again it would be better to be somewhere else. He’d certainly had his say publicly enough yesterday. But the scowl she received as she joined them had no fire in it, particularly in such poor lighting, and where else was she supposed to go.

They shuffled their feet wordlessly, an awkward change of stance wherein Miller managed to convey that he wished neither of them was here, and wherein Vale ignored any distance Miller tried to get from him. Even though they’d not been talking, it felt like walking into a conversation that hushed as she arrived. It was act of stubbornness to stay there, which she did, turning her head away to peer at the alchemist and his lieutenant as though she sensed nothing amiss.

There was an audible sound as Miller opened his mouth, prying his gritted teeth apart. “How far in would you say we are, cadet?”

She stilled any surprise as she searched for an answer. She’d been considering it as they walked – the bearing they followed, and the speed with which they travelled. Yesterday they’d started and stopped over and again to check houses, or waiting for Colonel Grand to widen the street, but today their path was clear before them – stopping for Fossorial to clear more dirt was more of a pause than a complete rest.

“Within sight of yesterday’s incident,” she ventured. “A little bit further east, perhaps.”

A quiet snort burst from Vale, and he met her eyes with a stare. “Bang on,” he challenged.

Hawkeye inclined her head – they could very well be under the exact chip of brick that left that scratch on her scalp, but so long as she was in the right area, she didn’t see the need for absolute precision. All she was trying to do was make sure she didn’t get lost.

“We’ll see who’s right when we head up, then, won’t we?” Miller said, tetchily.

Hawkeye fought not to sigh. She didn’t need to make a competition out of this, but if they had to in some attempt to restore peace, then that’s how it would go.

It wasn’t long until Fossorial and his lieutenant had finished conferring, and the lieutenant turned to address the soldiers while the alchemist went ahead, flipping through the arrays in his journal.

Soldiers quieted quickly as their leaders moved, and the bark of the lieutenant’s voice echoed in the tunnel. “Squad Epsilon will go up here. If there is no sign of the enemy, you will retrieve our fallen comrades, then return to the tunnel. There is better fighting ground ahead that will serve us well to finish the task. We would encounter the enemy there, if we can manage it.”

Hawkeye’s brow furrowed. Better fighting ground – was that the Daliha-Arja border? She tried to remember how Colonel Grand had put it yesterday: good ground for the Amestrians to fight on, but not so good for the Ishvalans. It was open area where targets would be easy to find, particularly targets coming up out of the ground. Was that the better fighting ground the lieutenant was talking about?

“The tunnel is opening up. Maintain order until safety is confirmed.”

Alchemical light flashed up ahead, but the end of the tunnel didn’t move. Instead, when the blue glow faded from a corner, a grey, dim light was left in its place, casting the barest difference between light and shadow on what looked like a ladder carved in the wall.

“Makes a smaller tunnel out at least,” Vale muttered.

Hawkeye nodded. The gaping cave they’d walked into was broad enough to drive a vehicle through – if the exit had been the same size, keeping Ishvalans away from it would have been a job for a whole company of soldiers.

The snipers stood with the platoon, devoid of any use underground, and watched as six soldiers scaled the earthen ladder, dim natural light illuminating them just before they passed by the roof of the cave. Dove bounded up the ladder, face held photograph-still in determination. As she disappeared up to the surface, Hawkeye felt a wave of nausea and certainty, that that expression would be what she had to remember Dove by when she died – strong, and ready, and rushing in where she was commanded.

Her stomach churned. They waited, but there was no call from the squad aboveground to bring back-up. No sound of gunfire. She held onto the image of Dove’s face whole and alive.

Tense minutes passed before there was any movement at the top of the ladder. A scuffle alerted the soldiers waiting at the bottom, and soon a voice called down. Limp, dangling legs in uniform came down through the hole, and with some effort the soldiers at the bottom took their weight, reaching up to grab the waist of the corpse being passed down to them. Three bodies were passed down this way, and Hawkeye watched as the men catching them winced at the smell, the blood, the thought of death being so close.

All of the soldiers from the surface came back down alive, the only corpses the ones from yesterday. She counted the living soldiers as they made their way back down – not one missing – and noted Dove among them. There was relief, but at the same time the sense of unease didn’t leave. They didn’t find a fight here, but they were going to go find one today. Those three wouldn’t be the only bodies in the tunnel.

Fossorial closed off the exit when they were all down safely, and lengthened their path.

Counting her steps underground was different to counting them up in the streets. There was no sense of distance that came from seeing the landscape around them, so all she had was the numbers in her head and the efforts to maintain an even stride for her counting, while walking alongside people caught up in their own strides, too. A flicker of amusement passed over her as the thought occurred to her that they wouldn’t be able to determine whether she or Vale was correct for where they had stopped. Vale wasn’t likely to interview the soldiers who went to the surface, and she didn’t have his drive to win a petty competition.

When they came to the end of the tunnel Fossorial didn’t immediately move forward to continue his alchemy – he consulted with the map again, drawing the soldier holding it over to the side of the tunnel while the lieutenant ordered the various platoons into position. The snipers and their squad were marshalled into the end of the tunnel and told that they’d effectively be covering the platoon’s rear as they marched back to yesterday’s territory.

Hawkeye tried to picture the world above the ground to ready herself. Sparse. Few buildings for cover. Cloudy, if the dim light over the ladder had been anything to go by. Maybe that would make it easier for their eyes to adjust to the light. She’d be coming out like a baby into a world of harsh, bright sun – she hoped there was cloud cover. The flashlights were all still on, and she briefly wondered if there was merit to what that soldier had said – was there some way to prepare her eyes for the light?

He was there in the squad with them, Nelson, passing his flashlight between his hands with nervous energy. Just the thought of staring into a flashlight made her dismiss the idea of ‘preparing’ for the surface. It would just leave an afterimage, making the day-blindness harder still. There may be another way to do it, but for now she’d just have to push through the change.

The light of transmutation shone close by, and behind the shoulders of the soldiers ahead of her she could see the Fossorial Alchemist with their group. He’d extended another ladder up through the ceiling, natural light coming in through it, and without a moment’s hesitation, the squad started up it. When it was her turn Hawkeye put a hand on the ladder and was surprised by the texture – solid, almost like metal, rather than the earthy feeling she’d expected. At least it meant that the soldiers ahead of her weren’t kicking dirt down onto her as they went.

She came up into a house, which the soldiers ahead of her were already checking for occupants. Even as she climbed to her feet in the kitchen the hole erupted onto, there were shouts of surprise on the floor above, and gunshots. She moved into a crouch behind a counter and unslung her rifle, eyes out the windows for any neighbours who might come running.

Not a cloud to be seen outside – late morning, and the sun was high. The hole back at yesterday’s location must have been into a house as well, to have avoided the harsh light that would stream down from a sun almost at its peak. It was a much better option to pop out into a house than into the street where they’d be blind in the light and easily seen by anyone passing by. A sense of awe came over her at the precision it would take to make an entrance specifically into a house – she wondered how intentional it was. It must be. Although, they were lucky there was no-one in the kitchen when they made their entrance – they would have been easy targets.

Eyes still on the window as the last of the group came up through the floor behind her, she could see the next house over was at a decent distance. They’d not come too much further from the limits of yesterday’s work, but the houses were starting to spread out. There would be no tight corners in alleyways this time.

“Clear,” a voice said behind her, followed by a quiet chorus of acknowledgements. The hole in the floor of the kitchen glowed again, and closed up into solid earth once more. Their escape route would be following the squads popping up from other holes.

While everyone gathered together to discuss their plans, she stayed at the window, once daring herself to move a little higher to get a better look out. She took in the wide streets and expanses between buildings and thought of the main road of the village she’d grown up in. Add some grass and trees, and make the buildings out of wood or a paler stone with a sloped roof, and it wasn’t all that different.

She listened to the group talking in low tones behind her: they had oriented themselves so they could point back to the Amestrian camp, and assess where the other squads were coming up. From the sound of it, the team leader had more information about that than Hawkeye had picked up – or perhaps just more experience. He outlined a direction for them to follow, and let Miller point out what the snipers wanted in terms of cover and communication with the platoon. Operating as one small unit was well and good until they were trapped in the middle of Ishvalan territory, with their safe retreat inaccessible by anyone but the alchemist.

Vale’s voice joined the others: “If we’re headed back east, it looks like there’s a storehouse another fifty metres along.”

One of the soldiers grunted.

Miller made some sounds of agreement. “We clear that out and it will do us well. Will we have cover from the terrain on the way?”

“Short bursts of partial cover. We’ll need someone up top on overwatch.”

“Right. Any sign of the other groups coming up, who could help us take it?”

“Looks like Gamma are in the house just across the road,” a low voice said.

“And is there any signal we need to be prepared for, or anything I haven’t been told?”

Hawkeye remembered Miller and the Fossorial Alchemist arriving for the mission, and the brevity of their strained conversation. The discomfort she felt at their terse exchange was echoed in the response to Miller’s question.

“N-no … No signal. Just wait long enough for all the squads to make it up, then move when convenient.”

The silence that followed was telling. What sort of military strategy worked on personal convenience?

The voice came back with a defensive twinge. “It’s a better plan than it sounds – you never know what another squad has come up into and it gives us the freedom to respond if needed.”

The necessity of that freedom may have said less about flexibility and more about the danger of coming up into an unknown, unexplored enclosure. Hawkeye felt restless – like a sitting duck, waiting for attack.

A slight visual disturbance caught her attention, and she popped up briefly from her cover to see it better. The windowsill of the next house over had lit up with the reflection of the blue alchemical glow. It wasn’t bright, but it was enough that it attracted attention. She fell back from the window, her heartbeat picking up.

“One of the other squads is coming through next door,” she announced in a quiet, level voice, interrupting something Miller was saying. “The alchemical process can be seen from the street and is a target for anyone who sees it.”

“No-one’s come yet,” one of Fossorial’s men said quickly.

“But we’ve been sitting here,” Vale countered, “shining alchemical light in at least three different directions so far. If there’s anyone there to see it, they’ve seen it.”

Miller swore, his plosives magnified by the chamber, needless extra sound as the whirring cogs in his head switched tracks. “Vale and I will take overwatch here. Hawkeye, you head for the storehouse, and we’ll leapfrog you when it’s settled enough. You three make sure she gets in there safe, or pull back if there’s already someone in there.”

Hawkeye scrambled up into a crouch, finally joining them in the main room when one of the two remaining soldiers took her place watching through the kitchen window. Vale was already bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Miller was paused at the bottom, and caught her eyes as she came in.

“You ready?”

She nodded.

The muscles in his jaw flexed. “Use your best judgement. Stay safe.” And he bounded up the stairs after Vale.

They burst out onto the street single file, tight against the side of the house as they darted forward, two soldiers ahead of Hawkeye and one behind. Her feet pounded against the dirt, taking ground as fast as she could, but not fast enough to outrun the Ishvalan voice raising an alarm. It seemed distant – maybe a street over.

Vale had been exaggerating the level of cover between their current location and the storehouse. There was nothing but the buildings they huddled up to, all three other sides exposed to the wind and fire of Ishval. The storehouse was a safe haven and a threat all in one, its lone window above the entrance giving no clue of how many people could be inside. All she could think about that as she dashed towards it was that none had come to the window yet, so there was hope.

The first gunshot rang out when they were at the door, Hawkeye already skidding to a halt so that she didn’t run into the soldiers ahead of her as they addressed the issue of the lock. One aimed the heel of a boot at the hinges, and the other yelled out and fell hard to the ground, blood splattering on the dusty ground as he took a wretched breath.

Hawkeye spun, raising her gun as her eyes wildly darted for the shooter. No-one visible on rooftops, movement down the street was the blue of the Amestrian uniform, no-one visible at windows – and here she was with her gun raised, making herself the next target as another kick fell fruitlessly against the door. What sort of half-thought out plan was this?

More gunshots rang out, but not near her – she could only hope that someone else had found the shooter. There was a flash of white and beige coming around the side of a house, and all she could do to get to safety was shoot before she got shot while the men behind her got them into the storehouse. Her heart sank as she pulled the trigger on a boy, knife in his hand. The bullet entered at his brow and he dropped. Twelve, she told herself – he can’t have been older than that. With a cry, a head poked around the corner, younger still, and she raised her gun again.

A kick finally broke through the door, and the storeroom was like a vacuum, sucking them all in as Hawkeye and the soldiers folded together through the door into safety, the injured man dragged by his comrades. His breaths were ragged and wet – a hacking cough at the fuss from being pulled inside. He wouldn’t last.

The inside of the storeroom was orderly – a stone staircase wound up around the outside of the room, along the left and back wall. The rest of the space was open – one single room downstairs, and – assumedly – one upstairs. Sacks were piled on top of each other, clay jugs sealed and marked. The Amestrians wouldn’t touch any of it except to destroy it.

“Nelson, stay with Reiner and guard that door,” the squad leader commanded, indicating the one that had just been kicked off its hinges and propped back against the frame. He took to the stairs, Hawkeye two steps behind him.

The upper room was empty – dust spread unevenly, as though whatever stores had been in here had been recently removed. As they came up into the secure loft, the leader faltered, suddenly adrift now that they knew they were in relative safety.

“Where – uh, what now, cadet?”

The deference was new. She was so used to people passing over her because of her rank – but this was her part of the mission.

“I can take it from here, sir,” Hawkeye said, dropping her pack to the floor as she eased up to the wall under the window. There was no use unpacking everything – they were going to be moving quickly today – so she made sure fresh ammo was easy to access, and left the bag propped open. “Go see to your man.”

She stretched her fingers out as he retreated to the lower level, then brought her rifle up to the window, peering out into the street.

There were clashes all along the street – the danger of entering a place that hadn’t been cleared methodically. Bullets seemed to be hitting both sides. A well-muscled Ishvalan swung a mattock up above his head, and Hawkeye let off a shot at him too late, putting a hole high on his forehead but not before he’d buried the tool in the soldier in front of him. Blood and viscera spewed from both of their heads, and she was safe in her storehouse.

She’d call it unfair, except that she wasn’t sure she knew what fair was anymore. Was ‘fair’ about putting everyone in the same amount of danger and seeing who came out alive? Or was it about killing one of them for every one of us that was killed? She knew which side had the higher number of deaths at the moment, and it wasn’t the Amestrians – but still, something about all of this felt so ridiculously, horribly unfair that she should have to be in this position, and there was no way to fix the problem except by ending the war.

Almost a full clip into the battle a throat cleared behind her, and she took an extra moment to pull the trigger on an Ishvalan leaning out of the window of the house opposite. “Mhmm.”

“Reiner is dead, and we have nothing to do here. You’re safe, right?”

Hawkeye leant back to reload carefully, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “Safest building on the street,” she said wryly. In the middle of a warzone. There was nothing they could do to protect her from a grenade thrown through the window, or a well-timed bullet. But they were meant to be there to protect her.

“We’re doing nothing in here.”

She glanced at the man, his uniform stained with the blood of his fallen squad-mate.

His tone shifted, decisive. “We’re going to move on, cadet. We’ll join another squad for now and come back for you when you need to move on from here.” This time when he said her rank it felt less like he was using it to replace her name, and more like he was trying to highlight that she couldn’t order him around. He began moving back down the stairs before he’d even finished talking.

“Yes sir,” said her hollow voice as he left her there, alone.

More Ishvalans came out of hiding than usual – adults and children, attacking or fleeing as their instincts led them. Hawkeye hadn’t seen this many people in one place since the push through the city had begun. With a whole army advancing together through the streets, Ishvalans had fled from the incoming wave. The Fossorial Alchemist had brought them all up ahead of the wave, right into a part of the city that hadn’t yet felt the need to evacuate.

Many of those who fled escaped. The platoon here wasn’t enough to take them all down, and the Amestrians were trying to work back towards cleared territory – leaving great swathes of space for those who wished to skirt around them to freedom. Hawkeye did her best to focus on those that fought back, but the trickles of escapees were clear in her mind – a jumble thoughts that someone could escape and live, or that they’d bring more trouble back. But there were too many for her to shoot them all, so she did her best to eliminate the threats. It was more about keeping Amestrians alive than killing the Ishvalans, that way.

There came a point when she had to change her seating position. The majority of the battle no longer angled back towards the building Miller and Vale had been in, instead heading further along past her. She switched to the other corner of the window, watching the Amestrian forces pushing forward – or back, really – towards their goal.

The enormity of being surrounded by enemies came over her. Did this platoon always fight like this? Coming up into enemy territory where retreat was reliant on the safety of your alchemist? Whose idea it was to fight like this was beyond her – there was an element to which it made the troops fight harder in order to get to that point of safety again, and another in which it made them work harder to protect the alchemist who was their way out if things really went south.

She hadn’t seen any of his alchemy since they’d all come up to the surface, and had no idea what he was like as a combatant. Maybe he was immobilising Ishvalans by encasing them in dirt for the Amestrians to shoot, or maybe he just buried them himself. There had been nothing big or flashy, but she also didn’t know where he had come up. Although – he was a researcher, not a fighter. Maybe he stayed hidden until the area was clear, and then he would come out and widen the road for the mission. Or he could be dead already, and they were stuck here in the middle of Ishvalan territory.

It wasn’t long after she’d changed her seat that the other snipers emerged from their location, trotting down to their own better angle on the combat. The squad members that had stayed with them moved quickly, pausing briefly at the corner of each building before waving the rest of them on.

She scanned the area for anything down the sides of buildings across from her, where her view would be better than theirs, and they passed safely to a building on the limits of the angle she could get without sticking her head out of the storehouse window.

The problem with being in a building with only one window was that her view was entirely set on what was on the street ahead. She could see the building in front of her, and a small slice of perimeter – infinitesimal, when compared to the view from an open rooftop. If she sat with her back to the wall by the window and craned through the slit that it became at that angle, she could see maybe fifty metres down the street. There was no way she could see anything of the buildings on her side, or anything further along without losing the protection of the building. So when the warrior priests arrived on the street, closer than expected, it felt like they had emerged from nowhere.

Miller wouldn’t have been set up properly yet. They’d barely all made it into the house, let alone swept for safety and had him in a nest, ready to shoot.

It was a charge, a dozen or so men suddenly appearing in the periphery behind the Amestrians, and coming upon the platoon in a rush. The mission with Comanche flashed in Hawkeye’s memory as she tried to get a lock on any of them. Fast, erratic movements. Giant, jagged knives slashing at blue uniforms. The first garbled scream sounded before she could line up a target, as the first of the Ishvalans met with the unwitting soldiers, blade first.

Because of their speed she lowered her aim a touch. The idea of killing with the first shot was beyond her here, as they darted and changed directions so quickly – she couldn’t lock on to their heads the way she could with the untrained Ishvalans – so she aimed for the chest, and when she pulled the trigger the bullet managed to hit a shoulder instead. Better that than hit one of the Amestrians beyond them. The man who had been hit slowed, and she lined up her second shot. Then the charging priests split.

Three broke off from the pack, diverting towards the new sniper house. She held her aim and made the shot even as her stomach sank. All that speed in an enclosed space. Warnings about dropping her weapon and running if she was going to be targeted came to the fore in her head, but they weren’t for her anymore: they were for her team.

And then suddenly it was for her as well.

Two pairs of red eyes turned from the edge of the battle, and although they didn’t look right at her, she knew she was their target.

They knew she was there. And as they ran back into the periphery, and out of her line of sight, she realised they knew her line of vision – and they were coming for her.

An active battlefield, and here she was, alone in a tower that had a broken front door and no back exit. Against any average Ishvalan fighter she had better than even odds, but this could easily be the end of her. There was no time to do anything about her father’s lunatic legacy – they’d either find it when they killed her, or they’d mangle her enough that they wouldn’t be able to make it out. Ishvalans didn’t use alchemy, though. In their hands it would disappear. So she had to die among enough of them that they could destroy her body before the Amestrians came back to claim their dead – or she could try to survive. There were only two of them – what was to guarantee her a real death?

And what if

she didn’t

want

to die?

\---

A silence, filled with the memory of screams. The camp was worse, alone. Quiet. Nothing to drown out the morning’s work. Not enough men off duty for the laughing camaraderie of a campfire in the evening.

The heat of the sun was an oppressive reminder of the flames he created. It didn’t have the same come-and-go heat that he felt in the cells between moments, instead a slow, constant heat beating down on his head. It wouldn’t kill him quickly. It would take its time draining him dry through sweat, searing his skin first. It would take its time killing him, if he were trapped out here in the open. But his lunch break was over and he meandered back to the cells – back to the shade. There, someone would be trapped and waiting for him, and he would be the relentless sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in really rough situations people's brains start going weird with coping mechanisms. I don't particularly want to saturate the story with those, but mostly from this point I've started putting in a few things where Hawkeye's starting to show a bit more mental wear and tear. That moment with Dove, for example, that foreboding that Hawkeye feels was meant to be less of an actual premonition and more about the sense of impending doom that people feel when experiencing extreme anxiety. Hawkeye doesn't strike me as a typically anxious person, but I can see how living under constant threat could make anyone feel that way.


	17. Chapter Sixteen

Other soldiers talked at times like life itself was a burden – those jokes glorifying death, toying with the beautiful idea that it would really be for the best if they’d never been born. She understood the sentiment; life was painful. It was a series of connected tortures to various levels: the death of her mother, the pain of rejection and neglect by her father’s hands, the indifference and judgement of the other girls at school who could have been friends but for some always excusable reason just weren’t. Her father’s conditional offerings of vague affection and momentary attention that required her to put aside any hopes of a normal life – and death – in order to bear the burden of his research.

Through it all, the thing that carried her forward was hope. Not even hope for herself – she’d never been given reason to hope for a good life – only that her existence could mean something. If there was anything her father had given her, it was that, with his endless studying and his need to leave a legacy. Maybe that’s why she’d been so drawn in by Mr Mustang’s dream; she couldn’t find the sense in having hope for herself, but it was perfectly reasonable to want to make things better for others. Somewhere along the way the world might just become the sort of place where she could find peace and meaning. If not happiness, then peace would do.

Even through the connected disappointments of life, there were still moments of beauty; not every rain shower was going to be a flood. The sound of rain falling against the roof of the verandah had drawn her out to sit on the front steps of her childhood home more than once. The petrichor settled warmly in her lungs, a rich, earthen sensation unlike the dust of the desert. A heaviness that spoke of the land’s fertility and eagerness to grow. Even when neglected, it still bore the fruit of nature. Life still found a way, like hope in a child’s hurting heart.

He had been a sweet young man. He made no real overtures of friendship when she was at home between terms – just like the girls at school– and she didn’t know him as anything more than a fellow boarder in that old house. All they had in common was that house and her father, and polite greetings as they passed in the hallway between their various studies. But he made her father light up when they talked, two intellectuals in discourse together. Not quite as equals – he was there to learn after all – but close enough in understanding that her father was drawn up to the surface of the grave he’d lived in, and fresh life was given to him once again. When he left things got worse at home, not because she missed him, but because her father did. To her he was still an unknown. She didn’t think she had ever really seen him until the funeral.

_“For those in this profession, at any given time,” he said wistfully, “they could wind up dead at the side of some road like garbage, so to speak. Still, to have a chance at becoming part of the country’s foundations, and to be able to protect everyone with my very own hands …”_

She’d never been a big picture kind of person – her father’s desire for influence was within the realm of knowledge and he was happy to keep his sphere to one person, not to an audience that could applaud his findings. Mr Mustang’s dream opened her eyes to the world as a place where she could make a difference, even with her quiet voice.

_“… I feel fortunate.”_

Did he still feel so lucky, now?

She’d given him the knowledge to take his alchemy further, and she thought she’d accepted his dream to give her life as a part of the country’s foundations. It had been naïve to think she could throw her life away, with the research she bore on her body. More naïve still to think that when it came to the moment, she would be able to let go of it.

No. She wanted to live. Just not a life under the control of her father and his requirements of her.

The Ishvalans were fast, darting directly out of her line of sight even as their eyes were fastened in her direction. How had they known she was there?

She cursed the soldiers for leaving her – and again for doing it without setting up some sort of barricade. There were enough jars and sacks downstairs that they could have done something (maybe they had done something and she didn’t know – but there was no point in trusting to that). The upper room was bare of anything she could use to slow the priests down, and she wasn’t going to go downstairs to start a barricade where she would have no warning before they burst in.

Leaning her head out of the window was about the stupidest thing she could have done, but she did it anyway, because what’s the point in avoiding a bullet to the head if you’re about to be stabbed anyway? They were edging their way along the buildings towards her, striped sashes hailing her imminent death. She pulled herself onto the window ledge to get a steady aim, and as she hauled her rifle around, one looked up and shouted a warning to his friend. They threw caution to the wind, running toward the door she was perched above – the door that was broken off its hinges and could do nothing to stop them. A fortress of a storehouse, and the first thing the men who opened it had done was destroy the main defence.

She let off shots as they ran, aiming as well as she could when she didn’t have time to centre herself – when they zigged or zagged unpredictably at each lightning-quick stride. Shot after shot missed, throwing up dust as they hit the ground behind them instead, until one finally hit the second priest in the thigh, having missed the chest of the man in front of him. He staggered, a prime target for a fatal shot, but the first man was only a metre from the door where he’d be able to get into the safety of the building. He’d be invisible until he burst up the top of the stairs, only steps away from her perch. She aimed for the closer man.

Her bullet hit him as he charged at the door, not even slowing for the impact as he burst through, and she strained to hear whether he fell to the ground dead or was only injured and heading for the bottom of the stairs. If he wasn’t dead, then she would be. By the time she’d flinched to aim at the second man, he too was already inside – the fastest stagger she’d ever seen.

She leapt up, listening for their movement. There was a quiet groaning. Neither was on the stairs yet – had they paused for respite? She bent out of the window for a darting glance down, but all she could see from this angle was the edge of the battered door where it lay flat on the floor.

Tension pulled at her as she gauged the distance to the ground. She could jump, but she wouldn’t be able to guarantee hitting the dirt in such a way that she could just spring up and keep going before they caught up with her. There was a chance she could find a way to climb down, but they could spring an ambush at any moment, and with two of them, they could catch her in a pincer action.

Eyes and rifle fixed on the stairs, she took arched, gentle steps forwards. If she wasn’t going to escape out the window, she could at least try to catch them in the bottleneck there.

There was an intake of breath from below, and as though responding to the sound of a starter pistol, she leapt forward amidst the sound of other footfalls. As she arrived at the top of the stairs, the first Ishvalan appeared at the bottom, his eyes wide as he saw her there, gun raised. Her blast caught him in the head before his foot reached the second stair, face shattering in red to match the shoulder where her previous shot had fallen. He fell back, toppling against the wall and she let out an exultant cry as hope flickered in her heart.

The second Ishvalan vaulted over the body of the first, landing with a grunt on the bad leg she’d given him, and as she pulled the trigger that flickering of hope waned. The empty clicking noise from her gun drew all colour from her face. He looked relieved. That wickedly jagged knife in his hand, and he’d been afraid of a quick death. It wasn’t fair.

Before he could use that unexpected burst of speed she knew was left in him, she spun the rifle around and threw it like a javelin, aiming it stock-first at his face. Without waiting to see how it landed, she pivoted and ran for the window, a plan of escape forming with each step from the debris of her discarded plans. She already had one leg over the window sill as he emerged at the top of the stairs, and in another heartbeat, she’d swung her body over the edge. Her knee bumped on the slight protrusion of the door’s lintel, and she used the doorframe to brace herself enough to make the drop to the ground safely, all the while her heart in her throat as she hoped she didn’t fall onto a waiting knife.

But no, she landed lightly on the ground, unencumbered by her rifle or pack, and there was no-one alive on the lower floor to take her by surprise. The body of the Amestrian soldier had been propped up against one of the jars at the back of the room, and she could see the feet of the dead priest at the bottom of the stairwell.

Scuffling steps on the floor above had her on the move again before she had even fully processed the scene before her. She didn’t look back. She just ran.

Sure that his eyes would be on her the moment he got to the window, she ran around the corner of the storehouse, out of his frame of vision. The houses either side of her may not have been cleared, but she pumped her arms and legs to get some distance from the storehouse before her tail could come around the corner. The dust coat whipped around her legs, her only hint of camouflage trying desperately to do its job covering a lone blue uniform in a town of sand. The backdrop of gunfire and dying screams grew louder as she wove through a backstreet.

He couldn’t have followed – not with that leg injury, and not with the head start she had – but she was alone, entirely alone, adjacent to a losing battlefield, and she didn’t know where to go to find safety – towards the other soldiers, who were being slaughtered, or away to give herself time to regroup? The loss of her pack and rifle made her feel naked, but her sidearm was still holstered and she’d been running like a headless chicken without even having drawn it, because the thought of slowing down enough to unholster it was beyond her.

She finally came to a halt around the back of a building when the sound of fighting on the main street was closer than expected. She couldn’t go any further without a plan. So far, no-one had appeared to attack her, no-one was following, no-one from the houses had called out her position for the priests to come find her. The lack of action made her flounder, adrenaline trying to drive her but with no idea how to respond when the danger was somewhere else.

As much as she’d been told to drop her weapons and run if they found her, it had been an accident when she did it. Yet here she was, basically defenceless except for the single sidearm she fumbled into her hands.

Wiping sweat off her brow, she tried to slow her racing mind, taking long breaths and focusing on the important details. One: she had a weapon good for relatively close aim, with limited ammo. Two: she was alone and couldn’t watch her own back. Three: without a good view of the fighting, she could have been walking into a lost cause that she would otherwise survive.

The idea of working off her own initiative was galling – how did she know she could trust her own judgement in a combat situation, when she hadn’t ever had to command or strategise for herself The part of her that made decisions seemed to have been dulled. Really, she just wanted someone telling her what to do, where to go. She couldn’t get in trouble for just following orders. But if she acted to preserve her own life here and they deemed it cowardice, she didn’t know what could happen to her. Not much if she was as valuable to Fessler as Vale was, probably. But she couldn’t count on that. Where was the alchemist at a time like this? Wasn’t it his job to be pulling the earth over the heads of the Ishvalans?

Instead of standing around behind a house, where anyone could walk around and find her, Hawkeye climbed up onto the roof, once again finding safety off the ground. The alchemist filled her thoughts as she climbed, a heavier burden coming over her as she realised that without him the only way home was crossing through enemy territory. How quickly had he died, for her to have seen nothing of him this whole time?

She rolled over the edge as quietly as she could, holding back the grunt as she landed, and took stock of her new hiding place. The roof was just like many others she’d been on top of, with the ledge around the outside and stairs coming up from inside the house. Her sidearm would be enough to shoot anyone who may come up to investigate – she could only hope no-one saw her scaling the wall. If she was quiet and stayed low, anyone left inside might be too busy hiding from the fighting on the street to check out any noises she’d made.

She set her back to the wall, watching the hole for some time as she pieced together her scattered thoughts. With no rifle she had no real offensive benefit from the location, despite the height and distance from the fighting. If she was going to help, it would be more helpful to get right in there – but the number of warrior priests who had come to fight were more than she’d seen before. It had seemed like a dozen – were there really that many? As few as two could easily kill most of a platoon, especially when they didn’t have any warning or defences. The alchemist may have given this platoon a fighting chance, if he’d fought back at all. The fact that the battle hadn’t yet ended was the most surprising part.

The screams of dying men and gunfire had been rich in the air while she ran – a distant background to her own flight – but as she considered the noise around her, she realised that they’d faded away. The gunfire had stopped, and there were moans and final gurgles. Only one agonised cry had any energy left in it, and it didn’t fade away the same way the others did.

There was no sign of movement from the stairs, so she let morbid curiosity pull her to the edge of the roof closest to where the fighting had taken place, and after one last glance toward the stairs, she peeked over at the corpses of her fellow soldiers.

A few of the Ishvalans walked among the fallen soldiers, slitting throats to ensure all the fallen were dead. There were no shouts or sudden flurries of action from the Amestrians – the Ishvalans had been thorough the first time around. The number of priests was lower than she’d expected. There either weren’t as many as she had initially thought or they had dispersed. The cry came out again: an elongated grunt, full of pain.

One of the priests raised his head, joining her in looking towards the source of the sound. It wasn’t from the carnage in front of her, but back a little way. Her eyes fell on the sniper house and her mouth tightened.

“Is that all of them?”

The Ishvalan’s conversation wafted up to her, and she shrank down, suddenly aware of how loud her heart was beating. Was she really this close to them?

“All that are here.”

“Latif will be happy to know his system worked.”

Yes, they did have some sort of alarm, or a messenger system. And a monastery nearby, by the looks of the reinforcements that had turned up.

“But how many children of Ishvala died before we arrived, Rashad?”

“And how many are still alive because we came?”

The was a pause, a scuffling of feet along the dusty ground. “We need to gather our living – bring them to the temple.” The voices were growing quieter, moving away.

“And what? Hide there until the alchemists come and tear it down on all of our heads? The temple is for emergencies, when there is no warning to get out. This is our warning. It’s time to evacuate.”

“They can’t stand up to the priesthood when it unites! See how quickly they fell today – Ishvala is with us!”

Hawkeye lay there, frozen, as the voices drifted away, a low hum from which she could no longer discern the words. She took long breaths as another scream burst up. Which one of them was it, she wondered – Miller, or Vale?

The memory replayed: the backs of the snipers and their guards as they poured into the house, not one of their eyes on the street as the Ishvalans came out behind them. The priests diverting, three towards the group who had no idea they were coming. Two with their heads turning, first a little, then all the way around to look at her.

She’d survived two priests all on her own, but she’d seen them from a distance. That accidental shot hitting the survivor in the leg had given her time she desperately needed. He’d still be out there somewhere. There was the chance he was still on the field, limping around and looking for her, but if he was smart he’d join his friends and get them to help him back to medical attention. He’d tell them she was out there, and soon she would be a lone Amestrian hiding while the Ishvalans scoured the area for her.

Did they do that? Did they clear complete areas, like the Amestrians were doing, or did they leave the Amestrians to scurry back to safety? She found herself hoping Rashad would win out in the argument with his friend, and that they’d evacuate their living. Supervising an evacuation would give the priests no time to look for survivors.

Some of the others in the platoon may have escaped, hiding in houses like she was. The Fossorial Alchemist – well, the Ishvalans had mentioned alchemists, but hadn’t mentioned him. Did that mean they didn’t get him, or that they managed to kill him without even realising who he was? It was the briefest snippet of conversation – she couldn’t be expected to know their every thought from it – but she found herself thinking over it, analysing for what information would be precious to her survival, or useful for if she made it back to camp.

The next scream drew her to look down on the street once again, a twinge in her chest wanting to do what she could to help. Further down the street, the remaining priests had gathered, their stances starting to relax as they parted from whatever conversation they had come together for. Most of them filtered back through the buildings in the direction from which they’d first appeared – the temple must have been that way – but one made his way towards the house where her teammate’s voice was grinding its way through a guttural shout.

Miller. The depth of the voice decided her. The way it bellowed up from in his broad chest, heated by a stomach filled with anger. Vale’s voice didn’t have that low rumble to it. The odds that Vale was still out there alive somewhere were low, but if anyone could sneak their way out of a trap like that, it was him.

She searched out the windows, trying to catch any hint of where in the house Miller might be. What sort of torture were they subjecting him to?

Certainty whispered over her, like the thinnest veil, barely touching her mind except to cloud out the other options. If she was really going to have to give herself orders, this was her mission. To any other decision she’d become paralysed – to hide out or sneak back to camp? But this decision was time-sensitive. Maybe she could save him. At the very least, she could make sure his pain wasn’t prolonged.

She surveyed the street, plotting out her path. Ishvalans lay all over the length of it, in the doorways of their houses where she had shot them as they tried their hesitant exits, along the middle in clashes with soldiers, under the bodies of the Amestrians. The sashes of the priests were few, but there were some there. Three. A whole platoon had taken down three warrior priests – one of which was her kill before the fighting had truly begun. No. Four. They’d killed four, actually, since she’d killed one in the storehouse, too. So a full half of the priest deaths were hers. She could consider that a measure of her own talent, but it felt more like the benefit of the distance she had from them. She had the time to try to line up a shot before they got to her, whereas the other soldiers didn’t always have that luxury.

How many priests were left? There were at least two with Miller: whoever had been working on him while the others slit throats out here, and the one she saw go in that direction. There had been three or four others in the huddle, who went off to the temple. The Ishvalans didn’t leave their dead behind if they could help it – they must have been getting people to come back for the clean-up efforts.

The fallen soldiers on the road drew her eye again as she considered her weaponry – going in with just the handgun was crazy; she should at least have a backup weapon. But the soldiers didn’t have rifles meant for the same long range as a sniper’s was, and they’d really all fallen in full sight of the house she was trying to infiltrate. If she went further around with only her sidearm, she had a better chance of sneaking up on them and being able to take them by surprise.

The recollection that the priests would be back to reclaim their dead finally set her into motion. As quietly as she was able, she went back down the side of the house where she’d first come up, taking advantage of the cover it gave her from the priests, should they look out the window of the house where they had Miller. Her eyes made a brief sweep of the street to ensure no-one had stayed behind on guard duty, and then she burst out into the open street, running straight across to the other side. She felt entirely unprepared with that single handgun, but a part of her took comfort in the fact that she wouldn’t have to see any of the dead soldiers up close. She wouldn’t have to see Dove.

That last view, then, Dove on the ladder, was really going to be her last memory of the other woman. Hawkeye shook her head and corrected herself as she ran – no, it hadn’t been her last view of Dove, because that was on the way up, and Dove had come back. But that had been the point when she knew this was going to happen.

Ducking behind the buildings for better cover from the main street, Hawkeye counted the houses along to where Miller and the others would be. She needn’t have bothered – another gravelly yell came from the house as she cautiously approached the window. How long had it been since those screams started? Five minutes? Ten? Fifty? Her sense of time had skewed as the battle overtook normal time. The volume of his cries had barely weakened in that time, although that could be more testament to the power of his lungs than to anything else.

She scanned the building. As she climbed into the window the stairs were on her left, and an open doorway to the right seemed to lead into the kitchen. There were bodies on the ground, the squad who had been allocated to protect the snipers. She didn’t see the two who had left her, but they very well could be with the rest of their platoon outside. The men here had had the same treatment: initial stabs to the body, and the necks cut for good measure. They lay on their backs, glassy eyes staring up at the ceiling. She turned away; there was nothing she could do for them, and now was not the time to grieve.

The sounds from upstairs were what drew her. She stepped past the soldier who had crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, and made her ascent slowly, grateful for brick and stone that wouldn’t creak to give her away.

“He doesn’t cry, this one?”

The Ishvalan was standing in a doorway at the top of the stairs. She could see his back, blocking most of the entrance.

“He does, he just doesn’t beg. He knows this is the end – don’t you, my hairy friend?”

One other Ishvalan in the room at least. She crouched as she took another step or two up, hoping to remain out of his sight until she was close enough to get both of them.

“Maybe too much hair.”

“Oh? Should I cut it off?”

“If you’re going to scalp me, then cut your own off while you’re at it,” Miller’s voice rasped, a rawness to the tone that she hadn’t noticed from a distance.

“Too much lip, rather,” the Ishvalan at the doorway amended, ignoring Miller. “Take that first – and get that scruffy bit of hair on it while you do.”

“Two in one. That’s the way.”

A wheeze escaped from Miller. “Quickly, now – maybe I’ll bite.”

Hawkeye stepped up one last stair and came up out of her crouch. Her gun was already pointed in the direction of the voices she had heard, and the Ishvalan hovering over a bloody Miller had his back turned as he brought the knife to Miller’s face. She sidestepped to aim around the legs of the man in the doorway, and pulled the trigger on the one with the knife.

As her bullet left the gun, the closer man was already turning, alerted by the sound of her feet scuffling on the stairs. She took him easily in the head before he had time to bare his dagger. He thumped to the ground, and she sprinted up the last few steps up to make sure both of them were really dead.

Miller eyed her as she approached.

There were two other bodies in the room as she stepped in – one more warrior priest, and Vale. A clean death, bullet to the head. His eyes stared blankly across the room, as though he’d watched every moment of what conspired there. Hawkeye tore her eyes away from the dead form of the best sniper there was in the Amestrian military, to nudge each of the Ishvalans over and confirm their deaths. She didn’t slit their throats to make doubly sure of it – seeing where she’d hit them was enough for her. She did spend longer on it than she needed to, trying to regain her equilibrium after seeing one teammate, and avoiding looking at the other.

The surprise of her sudden appearance wore off on Miller while she checked the man slumped at his feet. “Did … _we_ win?” he asked, his throat catching.

She let herself look up at him, taking in the blood seeping from his legs; his mangled, fingerless hands; and the dagger embedded in his stomach. For a sinking moment she thought the dagger in the stomach was her fault – that when she’d shot the torturer, he’d plunged it in – but her eyes flitted to the identical dagger on the floor, where the Ishvalan had dropped it when he fell. The one in Miller’s stomach had already been there, then. It didn’t make her feel any easier.

“No. Their friends will be back soon, especially if they heard those shots,” she said, trying to find a clean patch of floor as she knelt by his side. There was so much blood. A part of her wanted the busywork of trying to bandage his hands so that he could be transported to safety, but there was no-one to transport him. There was only her, and from the look of the blood around his legs she’d have to drag him all the way back through enemy territory, through dust and dirt with those open wounds.

Her eyes fell on the dagger in his gut, perhaps in an attempt not to think about his hands. Instead of trying to save him or help him, her voice came out weakly to ask, “Will you survive?”

His head lolled forward, and he grimaced and spat on the ground. “I’d better not.”

Their eyes met. The fire in his had dimmed, the furnace running low. This was what she’d come here to do – to cut short the torture. To put him out of his pain. Yet she stalled for time.

“Shoot me,” he said. “Just … take this out first.” He lifted a hand feebly to wave at the dagger.

Blood spurted from the stumps of his fingers with the movement, and she flinched back.

“I’d rather die from a good Amestrian bullet than this. I mean, I’d do it myself,” he continued, “but …”

She looked away when he proffered his hands.

“Please.”

Her fingers tingled in empathy with his wounds, and she became aware of a tightness in them – the pressure of blood pumping. Her heart was beating fast in her chest, giving her energy she could use to escape, but here she was instead, inside a dead end of a house, in a room where four other people had died already today.

The dagger was buried almost to the hilt in Miller’s stomach, and the part of the blade still exposed showed it was one of those wavy, jagged ones the priests all seemed to carry. Pulling it out would do almost as much damage as pushing it in had. There was no way this wouldn’t hurt Miller even more.

“Quickly,” he urged.

Obedient to her commanding officer, she raised a trembling hand to the grip, teeth clenching as Miller let out a hiss. His grunted encouragement was swept to the side of her mind as she felt the firmness of the blade’s position, just beneath his ribs. The reality of its position in his actual body. If she tried to take him back to the camp, even they wouldn’t be able to treat this. There was no way she could carry him without jostling it, no chance of avoiding infection or keeping enough blood in. He was going to die quickly or slowly. She was trying to talk herself into it, when she knew she really didn’t want to.

Vale’s words after her first time in the field came back to her. _“You just do what you can to stay alive,”_ he had said. _“You shoot the Ishvalans. You protect the soldiers. Your comrades – that’s who you’re protecting.”_

She’d shot the Ishvalans – and plenty of them – but it wasn’t enough. There was no other way to protect either of her comrades now. Readying her gun in one hand, she got a firm grip on the dagger with the other. Her eyes darted to his, and back to the dagger.

“Goodbye, sir.”

“Hurry up, cadet-”

She pulled the knife out as cleanly as she could, but it caught on flesh and ripped new parts of him as it came out. The wheezing roar he gave was nothing like those he’d had earlier, when he’d been full of life and merely incapacitated. This was it.

She shot him, so close that she felt the splatter of blood and brain, and then it was quiet again.

The pained snarl left on Miller’s face was a shadow of what it had been in life, the muscles no longer straining but pulling each other into equilibrium. She dropped the knife. He would have no peace, but he would also have no more pain. Vale stared at her blankly from across the room, witnessing one more horrible act.

There was no more time to stand around and wait for the Ishvalans to come back. Now the highest-ranking soldier in the room, she commandeered Miller’s rifle and sidearm, picking them up from where they had been kicked out of his reach. It would be too much to take Vale’s as well – he was still wearing them, and she’d have to dig around on his person for them. She couldn’t travel too heavily in unknown territory. Lastly, she took one of their packs, where it had been discarded on the ground – about to be unpacked into usefulness for the battle when they’d been interrupted. It was too dangerous to hang around and try to get her own pack back, and it wasn’t like she had anything personal in there, so she consolidated the rations from both of her teammates into one pack, leaving the rest of the contents intact.

She left the house, sneaking out into the afternoon and what now must surely be considered disputed territory, heading slowly back towards camp and wondering if Mr. Mustang and his beautiful dream had ever encompassed an eventuality where he would have to kill his own comrades.

\---

“Nope, nothing here for you. Is there anything else?” the post clerk asked hopefully, the look in his eye showing he knew the diversion was a long shot.

“Are you sure nothing’s come by for me?” Mustang emphasised.

His family had their own busy lives to lead – they couldn’t always be writing to him – but he was desperate at this stage. Anything of the world beyond the rocks and fighting was a taste of freedom.

“Maybe they’ve just been misfiled,” he added on an optimistic note.

That made the clerk wilt. “Sir, it would take me hours to go through all the mail we have back there. A job we do very carefully even the first time around, I assure you. You could try again when the next shipment arrives.” He levelled a look at Mustang that said he was an inch away from begging him to leave.

Mustang passed a hand over his face. “And when might that be?”

“Whenever they allow us to send and receive mail again,” the clerk said, tetchily.

An eye peeked out from behind the hand. “Allow?”

The clerk raised his eyebrows, as if to say that he stood by what he had said. Even if it was more than he should have passed on.

Mustang nodded, patting a hand on the mail desk as he considered the situation. “I’ll be back another day, then.”

“You have too much free time, sir,” the clerk called after him as he left. Or too little else to think about and no lines to make him wait, in this ridiculously empty camp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Torturer: He doesn’t cry, this one?  
> Miller: I’d give you my middle finger, but it looks like you’ve already taken it.  
> Torturer: … *stab*
> 
> \--
> 
> I enjoyed outlining Hawkeye and Mustang's relationship with each other a bit more. Subconsciously, I revert to the assumption they grew up close together (probably the power of some excellent fanon of their childhood, particularly Stoplight Delight’s We That Are Young), but when I look specifically into the evidence we have in the manga, I lean towards them not knowing each other that well at all. They behave like acquaintances thrown together - people who don't know each other well, but feel some sort of obligation towards each other. And Riza comments, "[my father] put me through a proper education”. For someone who grew up with a recluse she's actually pretty good at presenting as a normal person with social skills that she didn't learn from him. I feel like she wasn't trapped in there with him the whole time. So he [I] sent her to boarding school. She's met Roy and been in the same house as him, but not for years - just for snippets at a time.


	18. Chapter Seventeen

The way the sentry made it sound, when he brought a tired, stumbling Hawkeye to the Colonel in charge of the night shift, was as though she had just emerged out of the darkness next to them. It wasn’t like that – she’d recognised the buildings around the edge of camp quite a way out, and had been proceeding with her coat pushed back so they could see the blue uniform from a distance. She’d kicked some remnant of rubble with a tense, aching foot, and gathered the attention of a handful of soldiers at once, multiple voices calling for her to identify herself as the beams of their torches converged on her.

“Sniper team five, back from mission. Cadet Riza Hawkeye,” she’d said in some imitation of how returning to base usually went. The beams of light searched the empty space behind her, and she added, “That’s all.”

Her report to Colonel Vickers was short, and just as illuminating for her as for him. He was well acquainted with the early stages of the mission, having received a briefing from the alchemist when he returned. The wave of betrayal she felt had to be pushed aside quickly as Vickers pressed to hear the rest of her report, drawing out of her all she could remember about the enemy: the numbers of priests, how many were killed, the direction they came from, what she recalled from the conversation she overheard. He was very interested in that snippet of bickering about strategies, trying to get a word-for-word account which she couldn’t quite manage. When he had extracted everything she could recall, he dismissed her with a vague order to go by the medical tent.

The medic was unimpressed with being sent a soldier with no cuts, no bruises, no wounds. In fact, once he’d ascertained that none of the blood on her was hers, he told her, “All you need is some _sleep_ ,” as though she should have thought of that before coming to him, and he returned to a tent full of legitimately injured patients.

The camp was not as busy at night as it was during the day time, but still she had to track back past soldiers who were up for night shifts or drinking away the events of the daytime. As she walked, she still had the phantom feeling of the dagger’s hilt in her hand – how it had held stable in Miller’s stomach. The sureness, the certainty of feeling a person’s life in her hands. The warrior priests had strong arms corded with muscle, made for swiftly plunging their blades into their victims. She wondered if that muscle made it easier for them than for the average knifeman. It certainly was easier for her behind a gun. Just point and aim, and a person would die – there was no sensation of flesh yielding under her hand, just the trigger as it depressed. Maybe they built their strength not just to endure the fight, but also so that they didn’t have to remember the feeling of a soul slipping through their hands.

She’d ignored the faces of the other dead soldiers left on the Ishvalan street, but she couldn’t unsee Miller and what they’d done to him – or that wince left on his face after she’d shot him. Vale’s open, surprised eyes. Death was not peaceful. It was horror frozen forever. When their skin and muscle rotted away, would their skeletons still hold their final moments? No wonder the Ishvalans held to their faith in Ishvala – there was nothing left in this world, only hope in the next.

The building the women had been camping in was dark when she arrived. She wanted to just crawl in and sleep and be ignored for the next week, but her quiet self-identification as she entered created a flurry of movement.

“Oh, my gosh, _Riza!_ ”

“You’re alive?”

The silence of the room was broken by the sound of blankets being thrown back, and one person stirring awake as someone else fumbled with their kit on the ground. A shadow approached, putting an arm around Hawkeye and drawing her out of the doorway with Petrova’s soft voice.

The whole-hearted reception caught her off-guard. The affection and relief in these women’s voices was so strongly reminiscent of Rebecca that a part in her cracked, and she folded into Petrova’s arms, accepting a hug with stiffness that came more from the unfamiliarity of the contact than from discomfort.

The lieutenant patted her hair and let go with the reluctance of someone for whom physical contact was a normal part of life – who couldn’t understand those for whom it wasn’t. “You poor thing, come take your pack off. You must be exhausted,” Petrova said, a guiding hand on Hawkeye’s arm in the dark. “Oh – careful you don’t step on Jonte there.”

A mumble at shin-height told them Jonte was fine, and they skirted around the cot to find a good place to drop bags. The fumbling at the other side of the room finally bore fruit as a small flame flickered up from a lighter, and the candle that served as their only official lighting here came to life in Alsmith’s hands.

Hawkeye sought out her usual corner, and her heart leapt into her throat as she locked eyes with an unexpected face: Dove.

Red-eyed and trembling, Dove crawled out of the cot to clutch at Hawkeye’s arms. “You really made it back …”

“And you,” Hawkeye countered, shaken as she looked at a woman she had been sure was somewhere back there, awaiting collection with her fallen comrades.

“And the others?” Dove’s voice fluttered with excitement. “And Thomas?”

Hawkeye balked. “I don’t– I didn’t see him.”

When Dove’s hands dropped away from her, Hawkeye was guided to a cot to sit down. Petrova fussed over her, wetting a washer from her drinking water to clean Hawkeye’s face and hands – the closest thing she got to a bath or shower these days, and a waste of their limited potable water supply.

“How did you get out?” Hawkeye asked, looking up from the stained washer as it did its work.

Dove’s mouth twisted. “The Fossorial Alchemist.” It came out in an apologetic tone that sat between shame and pity. And well it should, as it struck deep at that betrayal Hawkeye hadn’t had time to process yet. “He’s … new to combat,” Dove said. “He couldn’t find the right arrays to attack when their forces came out, so he took the two squads nearest him back underground and made us retreat. He couldn’t take any more than that without risking the tunnel being compromised.”

Hawkeye clenched her fists. The glow of alchemy was unmistakeable – the Ishvalans would have diverted their course to target the source of the alchemy immediately. If Fossorial had tried to take the whole platoon with him, he would have been overwhelmed and killed, leaving that tunnel back to the camp. When a way out was only open for a short time, it was easy to miss. Hawkeye hadn’t seen any hint of alchemy, up in her tower, engaged with two combatants – or was it while she was running through the backstreets, no line of sight on the combat at all?

Two thoughts warred in Hawkeye’s mind: that when the Fossorial Alchemist panicked, he damned three of his own squads and the sniper team to a death she’d spent the evening skirting – and that when he panicked, he still managed to save two squads. There was nothing as simple as right or wrong, when there was a whole world of choices between the two.

“We would have all died,” Dove ventured. Hawkeye could see the same conflict being played out in Dove’s mind – the guilt for having been saved when not everyone else was, twining around the relief that she still lived.

Hawkeye twitched her mouth in what she thought was a smile. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

If the grimace on Dove’s face was any measure, maybe they didn’t remember how to smile any more. “Me too. That you are.”

It still hurt, being left on the battlefield, but the pain was vaguer – not one face to hate for the situation she’d been left in, but dozens, representatives of the war as a whole once again.

Alsmith had turned herself around on her cot, so her head was in closer to the conversation, the candle nearer the middle of the room now to offer its flickering light to everyone. The communications officer rubbed at bleary eyes. “Did you … find anyone else? Who made it back?”

It had been a long, tense return to camp. After she’d looted everything she needed from her dead teammates, she’d skirted through back alleys, moving slowly and taking to the rooves when they were close enough together to jump over. She’d seen Ishvalans on the streets – more people carrying away as much of their homes as they could. Scared, lonely people. It had been a relief when she finally made it into the area they’d cleared the day before with Colonel Grand. It was dark, but she recognised it by the flattened buildings either side of the main road, an entirely unliveable, impractical set of architecture except for the army that had plans to come through here eventually. The area had been so thoroughly demolished that no-one seemed to have returned here, and she was able to prowl on steadily with a clear path back to camp.

There had been no Amestrians other than the dead she’d left behind, only the enemy who would return soon enough. The one she’d shot in the leg was still out there, either gathering his strength to leave the storehouse, or already reunited with his countrymen. He’d have told them that she escaped him, and they would come for her. She hadn’t looked in the houses for any other Amestrians who had survived. She hadn’t seen any of them alive since Miller.

Hawkeye shook her head in answer to Alsmith’s question. “I didn’t see anyone else.”

“The other snipers,” Dove started. “I saw–”

Petrova cut her off with a glare, turning sympathetic eyes on Hawkeye. “You’re here, Riza,” she said, putting a hand on Hawkeye’s knee. “You’re okay.”

“They’re dead.”

Her words hung there in the candlelight, falling softly, slowly. Her teammates’ guns and pack were sitting on the floor where she’d discarded them. They were unguarded, open to anyone’s examination, and yet they didn’t stand out to anyone else as anything other than what they should be.

“And so are a lot of good men today,” Petrova said, her tone careful, as though she was trying not to startle a wild animal.

Good was a strong word for any of them here. They were dead, yes, and would surely be mourned by someone who loved them, but to think that any of them were good any more was a sort of naïve she couldn’t pretend to anymore. Hawkeye clenched her hands, feeling the resistance of the knife in Miller’s stomach. She cast her mind aside to the next thing instead. “They’re going to reassign me tomorrow, to another team.”

Another team could mean a change in duties from alchemist protection details to more overwatch work. It could also mean filling in the gap of yet another dead sniper somewhere else along the line, with another team that needed support – and with no other women to share a room with.

“So quickly?” Dove cried.

“They say they’ll do a lot of things, but plans are always changing,” Alsmith ventured. Military tactics had to adapt based on the situation at hand. She and Petrova must have been sending changes in orders all the time at the comms desk, but battlefield order didn’t seem the same as allocating soldiers to an area.

Petrova’s eyes travelled over Hawkeye’s uniform. “Have you been cleared by medical?”

“Yes.”

“What’s this, then?” The flecks of blood had dried in dark spots over her chest and arms, small specks really, but Petrova’s head jerked back at the large stain that travelled down from one knee. She’d been too close to see it before, but the flickering candlelight would have made it clear as she stepped back to survey Hawkeye from top to toe. “Are you hurt? Jonte–”

“It’s not my blood – it’s Lieutenant Miller’s,” Hawkeye said, remembering the pools of blood by his legs. Hamstrung to stop him getting away, most likely. Even if she’d been able to save him, she would have had to carry him back the whole way, if they’d hamstrung him. “It’s all Lieutenant Miller’s.” Every fleck of it. Even the Ishvalan she’d shot on the stairs of the storehouse hadn’t been close enough for her to get anything on her. The only person she’d ever killed that close was her own superior officer. How funny if she made it to the end of the war and the only person’s blood she’d worn was another Amestrian’s. A medic could say the same thing, but how vastly different were their roles.

“You should at least clean up,” came Jonte’s groggy voice. “Come by the medical tent with me in the morning and I’ll give you another look over. They can’t send you away if medical doesn’t let you go.”

“And if medical can’t keep you,” Alsmith suggested, “then Annika can sweet-talk the Brigadier.”

Petrova winced in Alsmith’s direction before turning back. “I’ll talk with him.”

Hawkeye met her earnest expression and gave a jerky nod. She didn’t deserve the protection these women offered her, but she couldn’t bring herself to reject it. How innocent they all seemed, trying to band together here in the middle of a war, not with that snarling sort of desperation in a combat situation, but with that slow, gentle sort of acceptance that felt closer to friendship than comradery. On the field, squads bonded as a matter of survival of the body, but these women were clinging to something more than that. Not just trying to come out the other side alive, but to come out whole.

There had been too much stripped away from Riza Hawkeye for her to come out whole.

But even just hearing them call her by her name – that reminder that she used to be a person before a soldier – was like a memory of better times knocking on the door. When she used to feel like Riza, and not just … Hawkeye.

It was too cold in the desert to disrobe at night time, but she rolled up the leg of her pants and let Petrova clean away the blood that had seeped through onto her skin. She succumbed to all ministrations offered her and as the precious candle came too close to its end, she allowed herself to be put to bed, laying in the cot she’d been sat down on without even wondering whose it was, while Dove was in hers.

When she woke later in the night, shaking and certain an Ishvalan priest had just killed everyone in the building next to them and was coming for her, she had to get up and look at the empty building next door, just to be certain that it wasn’t even being used as a barracks. The moonlight shone on a disquieting stain near the door where the inhabitants had died, but that was from the original Ishvalan owners – the corpses had been removed four days ago when camp was set up in this position. It didn’t help that she could remember that. It was all too easy to see the faces of the soldiers from her dreams, fallen near that stain.

Jonte was pulling shoes on as she returned. The medic startled as Hawkeye pushed aside the curtain that acted as their door, and Hawkeye just stared at her, unable to think of how to explain herself.

“Go to sleep,” Jonte hissed.

Again, Hawkeye let herself be put to bed, only to return to a waking nightmare. Vale’s eyes goggled at her underneath that round bullet hole, wide and surprised like a man caught unawares. At first she thought he was accusing her: “Did you shoot me, too?” – a measure of her guilt rising up to blame her for his death, since she hadn’t been fast enough to save them – but no. The bullet wound was real, and it hadn’t come from her. She spent most of the night trying to blink the image away, or to at least stifle the voice that asked whether her bitter, seething commanding officer had shot Vale before or after they’d seen the priests coming.

When the morning came, she was given her orders: no new squad, just rotating sentry duty here, where she’d fall under the command of whoever was in charge for the day.

\---

Two weeks passed in the camp on the hill. Mustang returned to the city no more well rested than he had been when he left. Which would he prefer – sleeping lightly because they could be attacked at any moment, or the nightmares of the screams? There was one thing he took solace in while he was there, and that was the downturn of Knox’s mouth as he came for the people Mustang had overcooked. Other scientists and doctors there spoke in clinical terms, hovering over someone trembling in the last throes of death, doing nothing to help but observe and take notes. Knox must have had a different role. One that gave him enough distance to still hate what he was doing.

Returning to the battlefield seemed like a continuation of an endless cycle. At some point it had to end. Wars finished – or soldiers were finally sent home for a break. There had to be a break, at least.

The rumours as he milled among the men were that Fuhrer Bradley was touring the lines. He’d visited before, surveying progress and giving a sense of purpose to the fighting. The Fuhrer’s presence fluttered some sort of life back into the patriots, waking weary bones and readying them to fight again. How long would it last?


	19. Chapter Eighteen

“Ho, cadet! Good shooting today!”

For the third day in a row, the same cheery voice called out its greeting. There was a measure of levity there that sat neatly on the border between friendly and irritating – a levity backed with gusto and grit.

Two weeks as a sentry sniper, and the battalion had hardly moved, despite its attempts to create a road forward. The entire line had crept ahead another two hundred metres, then found themselves plagued by regular attacks. A shipment of guns and explosives had brought new life into the rebellion, and here the Amestrians sat, just beyond that easily defendable land the Brigadier had been pushing for, beset day and night by the enemy.

Platoons had been shuffled to make them a workable size after significant losses, and officers had been promoted to fill the places of dead men. That’s how Hawkeye found herself saddled with the newly promoted Captain Hughes. He wasn’t that bad, he was just –

“Gone already, huh?” Corporal Havoc said, craning his head to watch the Captain’s retreating form.

Hawkeye shrugged. “A captain’s got places to be.”

His greetings were hard and fast, particularly on his way off duty, but always there. Sometimes he was like the machine guns Colonel Grand’s newly fixed arrays allowed him to make, spitting the greetings out at lightning speed on his way off to the next thing. Hawkeye couldn’t tell how much of it was personality and how much was trying to keep up with the demands of his new promotion.

Havoc’s hands slowly shuffled at a deck of cards, cards falling at angles being nudged back into place carelessly without a glance. “I hear he was a Warrant Officer when he arrived. A man’s gotta be in the right place at the right time to make three promotions, even on the battlefield.”

That comment irked her. As much as Hughes was a whirlwind, in and out of business, he took the time to acknowledge her work. And not just hers – he seemed to have the same jovial encouragement for a lot of the soldiers he worked with. She’d never had the benefit of his company – he was a captain – but he ate with the men on his platoon and they seemed just as comfortable around him as with anyone else. He treated soldiers like intelligent people instead of assuming his rank intrinsically made him smarter or better, and he’d used the advice people gave him, too. She’d seen him through her scope, and how easily he was able to adapt to new orders or intelligence. As much as his rushing through was an annoyance, it was a welcome one.

Prickling under Havoc’s scrutiny of an officer who did all he could to actually keep his men alive, a frown began to furrow her brow. “He works hard,” Hawkeye said pointedly.

“Oh–” Havoc turned, eyes wide as though he was about the deny his insinuation that Hughes had risen to his rank through nefarious means. Instead of a full denial, he blustered through. “Well, I’d hope so. We need some more good officers.”

“We do,” she said, quietly.

Havoc ruffled the cards one last time and finally began to deal some out. It was just the two of them, perched on an L-shaped piled of rubble that used to be a wall, with an empty box as a table. They could be playing Go Fish for all Hawkeye cared – having company in the quiet times was infinitely preferrable to letting her mind wander.

When it wandered, she thought too much about what she could have done differently on _that_ day. Refused an order. Told her backup she needed them to stay. Reloaded while the warrior priests were coming for her, instead of gawping after them. Run straight to the sniper house instead of down the back alleys. Tried to bring Miller back with her.

Thinking about it didn’t mean her solutions would have fixed anything, and didn’t change what she’d actually done, but she couldn’t stop. If nothing else, it could mean that she would react differently the next time – although at this stage it didn’t seem like there’d be a next time. She was stuck guarding the perimeter, which still had its risks, but when she was positioned much closer to the bulk of the army she was away from the more intense conflicts – left guarding patches that had become everyone’s and no-one’s as Amestris approached, instead of out there claiming new ground. What a dismal sort of thing to consider safety. What a dangerous thing to find calming.

Comanche and his squad had been in the area, and Havoc had sought her out after hearing about the cadet sniper who’d survived the death of her teammates. As the only cadet sniper at the front – let alone the only female one – she was easily recognisable in gossip. His presence over the last two weeks was a welcome distraction.

“So, what’s Hughes like as a commanding officer?” Havoc asked, picking up his hand of cards and fanning them out.

Hawkeye shrugged. “He’s not a sniper, and he knows it. He tells me which area needs to be covered and lets me pick where to set up.”

Havoc’s eyebrows rose. “That’s not bad, right?”

It wasn’t – it was good that he could acknowledge his lack of expertise – but it put Hawkeye on edge. She was a cadet, and even though she’d almost completed the stretch of battlefield experience she needed to graduate, she couldn’t help but baulk at being responsible for her placement. Would a more experienced sniper have chosen a spot that meant there were no casualties instead of two, that last surge forward? She would feel just as uneasy if Hughes had chosen a place for her, though. Maybe she just wasn’t used to being alone, yet.

“It’s not bad so long as nothing goes wrong,” Hawkeye murmured. “If it all falls apart, I'm not sure which of us gets blamed.”

Havoc swapped a card in his hand for a new one, waving it carelessly as he went. “Ah, that’ll go all the way to the top, won’t it? ‘Mr Fuhrer? I noticed some insubordination in the ranks your dear presence on the lines failed to curb. A slap on the wrist for you, sir, and don’t let it happen again!’”

The sides of her mouth twitched out of their downward turn and she swapped three cards in her hand for similar trash from the deck. She’d seen the Fuhrer last week, being led around by the Brigadier himself and tailed by a handful of stern-looking aides as he shook hands with soldiers and nodded at hollowed out buildings. By now he was halfway down the lines, increasing morale with that stony glare and talks about the patriotism of their mission. She wondered how much Bradley really believed it. She wondered if he would still believe it if he had to fight amongst them.

“What a tosser,” Havoc added when she said nothing. A self-satisfied grin appeared on his face as her grim expression eased again. “You know, I think his tours have actually worked, though. We’re not fighting any better, but I know a handful of men who have stopped pining after home so much. I can’t tell whether they’re holding it together because they’re suddenly inspired, or out of spite – doesn’t make a difference to the generals, though.”

He swapped one card again – the same one as last time, if she’d been paying attention to where he stored it. There must have been something worth keeping in the rest of his hand. Her own offering was so paltry that she had higher chances of winning if she bluffed her way through than if she picked new cards, but without a proper wager on the table there was nothing to win anyway. She took four new cards, replacing all but her Ace, and noted the relieved look on his face. Apparently his hand wasn’t good enough that she couldn’t have bluffed her way through by holding her cards. Another time.

Havoc set down his cards eagerly. “Three fours! Can you beat that?” The other card he didn’t swap must have been the Ace.

“Pair of sixes,” she noted as she set down her own hand. She’d got both of them in the last pick up. “It’s a less humiliating defeat than it could have been.”

“Ahh, defeat is defeat,” Havoc cheered, scooping the cards up to shuffle again. “In cards or on the battleground – you gotta do what you can to win, Hawkeye.”

“That wouldn’t include stacking the deck, would it?”

“You think I’d give myself fours if I was cheating?”

Hawkeye raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

“How would you even …?” He trailed off, frowning and flicking through the cards.

She’d never expected to find poker interesting, but Havoc was good company. He was honest, straightforward, and genuinely friendly. Recently he’d been a lot more light-hearted than their earlier conversations, too, when he’d announced his plans to die on the battlefield in some blaze of glory. And he wasn’t dead yet – that was a help.

A swig from her cup brought Alsmith and Petrova into her eyeline, leaving the tents that served as the communications offices. Shift changeover. The combat shifts swapped first, and Hawkeye and Havoc had been at rest for half an hour, now; non-combatants waited and watched that everything was safe and under control again before they got to leave their posts.

With a wave of her hand, Hawkeye drew their attention. Alsmith smiled back, and after a gesture from Petrova the two veered off their intended course to join her.

“Quiet shift, Riza?” Alsmith chirped as they sidled up.

“The best kind,” Hawkeye acknowledged. She didn’t know what Alsmith thought of as a quiet shift, but with no Amestrian deaths under her watch, and few injuries, that was as good as it got.

“Take them while you can get them,” Petrova mused.

Havoc’s head had wrenched up at their voices, and he eyed the new arrivals, attempts to stack the deck forgotten. Hawkeye uneasily dismissed Petrova’s tone, hoping that was a general statement about war rather than an insight she had into what was to come.

“Quiet shifts make me uneasy,” Alsmith added, glossing over the awkward silence. “It feels too much like waiting for something to go wrong. But I can see why you’d like them on your end.” A nervous laugh broke some sort of misery still hanging over them all, Havoc returning the laugh as she glanced at him.

Hawkeye shook herself out of some self-indulgent stupor, recalling manners she’d very rarely found herself in need of: introducing mutual acquaintances who don’t know each other. “Come join us. Second Lieutenant Petrova, Corporal Alsmith – this is Corporal Havoc. We’ve had a few missions together since I arrived – he’s on Major Comanche’s platoon. The Second Lieutenant and Corporal Alsmith are two of my bunkmates.”

Alsmith looked to Petrova, who frowned at Havoc. “Comanche’s platoon? How long?”

The remnants of a smile dropped off Havoc’s face. “Long enough, sir.”

A moment passed between them that Hawkeye couldn’t fathom – Havoc edging on slightly pale as Petrova cast a measuring eye over him. Petrova was a high rank to be associating with a pair of corporals and a cadet, but she’d made herself available to the women in the past and Hawkeye had, in a sense, forgotten how wide the gap was. Maybe she was assessing whether the length of Havoc’s service made him appropriate company.

After a considerable pause, Petrova nodded and moved to find a solid place on the rubble. With the higher-ranked officer joining them, Alsmith readily did too, acceding to Havoc’s gesture when he moved along to give her space near him.

“Havoc’s been teaching me poker,” Hawkeye said, flicking her fingers towards the cards that had been scattered over the box in front of them. “Either I’m a terrible student or he’s not much of a teacher.”

Sweeping up the cards, Havoc shrugged. “You’re just saving your luck for the battlefield, Hawkeye.”

“What does that say about you, then?” Alsmith joked.

As Havoc turned his startled look on Alsmith, Petrova raised her eyebrows. “You’re not taking advantage of our cadet, are you? What are the bets?”

“Ah – no bets, sir! Just a few friendly hands between comrades! Do you play?”

“Sure. Deal us in.”

Urged on by their new company, Havoc dealt out for all four of them. Hawkeye sat back, intrigued by the way that soft, gentle Petrova had shifted from self-titled “dorm-mum” to commanding officer; by Alsmith’s leaning in towards Havoc, prodding at him lightly to make him jump; by the way that Havoc’s nervousness vacillated between unease and fascination. He smiled and blinked fast, doing his best to juggle the attention of all the women, darting a look at Hawkeye every now and then as though to include her too – whether to draw her back in to the conversation or to ask her what on earth was going on, she couldn’t tell. Despite the nerves, he seemed to be enjoying himself. It couldn’t be often that a male soldier found themselves outnumbered by women.

As Alsmith got Havoc’s attention with a question about his boots, Petrova turned to Hawkeye. She gave a small nod over at Havoc. “Is he your protection in the field?”

“Only on– oh –” Hawkeye cut off as she realised what Petrova meant. “No, not like that. He’s just a friend.”

“Does he know that?”

“He’s been entirely respectful.”

Petrova frowned. “That doesn’t count for anything unless he’s the same after you’ve told him you don’t intend to sleep with him.”

Half-way through dealing, Havoc was earnestly showing Alsmith the twine he’d been using as laces since the old laces broke, in response to whatever her question had been. He was a practical guy – honest and open, as far as Hawkeye had seen. Even now, looking at him, she could see the way he leaned in to Alsmith, a flirtatious smile edging up on his face. Alsmith was pretty, and close, and seeming to show some sort of interest back, even if just for the moment. Had he looked at her like that as well? Hawkeye hadn’t noticed it, if he had.

“I’ll talk with him,” Hawkeye promised, earning an approving nod from Petrova.

“Best to tell him before you’re working with squads again,” the older woman urged. “So any hurt feelings have time to cool before he’s responsible for your life.”

The poker game was recommenced as Alsmith wound up the talk about boots, and Hawkeye found herself fumbling through the game itself as she tried to prepare a Serious Talk for the future. She’d had male friends at the academy and had been wary enough then, but somehow Havoc’s easy-going nature had slipped past her defences. She had something in common with just about every soldier here – a mission they’d had, or the sense of her own smallness in the scheme of things, the confusion of both wanting and not wanting to die, or even just the overall experience of war. The things that separated them all were becoming smaller as they kept fighting (except the alchemists – most soldiers still held them at arms’ length). Out of all the soldiers she’d met, Havoc was the soldier who, even before this shrinking of differences, had seemed the familiar – the most like her. He didn’t see the world separated into targets and comrades, just as many, many individuals, huddling together for protection, no matter which side they were on. He saw them all as people. He had to intentionally focus on the people who were his to protect, so that he could forget the humanity of the enemy.

It was the same reason why she liked Captain Hughes (and disliked his leadership). He made her feel seen. Hughes’ way of doing it was so briefly, so loud, that it felt like a spotlight being put on her in full view of everyone else. Havoc did it as someone coming alongside her, recognising her not just for what she could give him, but as someone who needed company. That didn’t mean he wasn’t looking for something else too, though, and she wasn’t about to give him anything more.

The idea of romance was foreign to Hawkeye. She found herself playing the rest of the poker game lazily, choosing almost at random which cards to keep and which to swap as she considered it. Of course she wasn’t going to start some physical relationship. Even if she’d wanted to, the tattoo was a barrier to intimacy – physically, psychologically, however. But if that wasn’t a factor, wasn’t Havoc just the sort of person who would be a good choice as a partner? And yet she had no feelings for him. It could have been the effects of war, dampening everything she didn’t have time to process, or even just the need for someone safe in every respect, including relationally.

After a few hands, Petrova and Alsmith left them, claiming an eagerness to get to their rations. Hawkeye nodded her obedience under Petrova’s pointed look, knowing that she would be questioned when she returned to the barracks. Dorm-mum indeed.

She’d mentally tossed around a few lines for how to start this conversation while playing, and settled in on coming at things from a positive angle.

“We’re friends, right?”

It was either that, or straight out with, “Just so you know, as far as I’m concerned, you are a sexless lump.”

Havoc’s mouth twitched into a quizzical smile. “Yeah?” The positive angle. Right.

“ _Just_ friends.” She watched him closely for any sense of discomfort or pent-up sexual frustration. What did that even look like?

To her relief, the smile widened. “Yeah.”

Hawkeye was relieved. That seemed settled enough for her, but for the sake of making it through Petrova’s questioning later, she added, “And you’re not going to go lax on my protection just because I’m not going to sleep with you?”

Havoc’s face twitched – Maybe that was too blunt – but instead of seeming weirded out, or put off from the confirmed friendship, he leaned back with a look of understanding. “That’s what they were here for?”

His tension from before had melted away, no longer trying to impress the others as women or as a superior officer, no longer deconstructing the encounter. Hawkeye felt her shoulders loosen, too, as he took the news so easily.

“Look,” he said, “I gave up any hope of that when we were still in the main camp. No-one thinks a guy is sexy when even his mother pities him.”

Hawkeye remembered the reference – their first conversation had been full of death and misery, and she told him his mother’s letters sounded like she thought he was going to kill himself. To say it lowered him in her esteem would assume that she had any opinion about him at all by that point. She didn’t know him, much less feel any sense of attraction or repulsion. That he could be interested in her without having had a conversation seemed alien.

“The clincher, though,” he continued, really grinning by now, “the real thing that confirmed it, was that time I complimented how your hair was growing, and then by the next time I saw you, you’d got someone to cut it.”

Hawkeye ran fingers through her hair. “Hm.” Since they’d run into one another again, it had been getting shaggy. The fringe had been rough and getting in her eyes – bad for her aim, as much as shaggy hair had never seemed to affect Vale’s accuracy. She’d asked the other women who had scissors, and would have cut it herself if Dove didn’t volunteer. It wasn’t neat, but it was serviceable.

“So yeah, we’re friends. I’ll keep you as safe in the field as I would anyone else.”

Hawkeye left feeling lighter. Confused about how the world worked and what her place in it was meant to be, but also as though a knot deep in her chest had untied itself.

\---

The first glimpse Mustang caught of Major Armstrong told him things hadn’t eased on the field while he was gone. To see a man so large looking like a hunted mouse was almost comical. He moved through the camp, flinching at sudden appearances, startling like a man on the edge. Mustang was hardly relaxed on the front lines, but he wasn’t jumping at everything around him.

He wasn’t the only one who noticed Armstrong, either. He caught the Major’s name bandied around by a huddle of soldiers off duty as he was on his way to report for an afternoon mission.

“–And Armstrong hasn’t been the same since it.”

“Serves him right, though. I heard he was helping Flinn.”

“What, they taking turns or something?” someone laughed.

“No, with the _escape_ ,” was the melodramatic reply.

Mustang slowed, turning his head as he passed so that he looked like he was inspecting the defences.

“Must have paid them off so he didn’t get executed, too.”

A snort. “No, a guy like Armstrong doesn’t have to actually pay them off. It’s the family connections.”

“Why would he do it, though?”

“Look, if some scum like Flinn wants to start a family with some Ishvallan whore, then there’s bound to be other miscreants who’ll try to hide the mess.”

“Using the trucks to escape, though, that’s filth.”

Mustang couldn’t linger any longer without stopping completely, but he played it over in his mind as he walked. Armstrong had been caught in some sort of collaboration? Helping people escape from the warzone, it sounded like. He didn’t know the Flinn they were talking about, but his curiosity was roused. Was this a sympathiser trying to help the Ishvallans escape, or was he literally just trying to help the one woman? He found it hard to pick out fact from conversation so propaganda-like.

Huh. Sympathisers, as far forward as here.

Letting an Ishvallan escape felt like a different sort of cruelty to him – like a cat toying with a mouse. Where were they going to escape to? It’s not like there was anywhere safe for them in Amestris. If they slipped off in the direction of Xing, they’d just stumble through desert until the sun beating down killed them. If Aerugo was going to take them, they’d have gone already. Putting them on Amestrian military trucks headed back into Amestris was just – well, just taking them closer to the prison where he and the alchemists were put to work experimenting.

He wondered if he’d encountered the woman while he was back at the camp on the hill. Maybe she’d been one of the new faces seared into his mind.

A day later, the mail finally arrived again. It came in great big boxes, a backlog of weeks to sort through, along with notifications that any future interference with deliveries would be handled the same way. Flinn’s name became a curse, and Major Armstrong took on the appearance of a man not long for this world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the two-month gap between chapters. That's less time than I thought it was, to be honest, and I can't promise that anything will speed up. Life circumstances are changing significantly.
> 
> Overshare incoming: I started writing this story when my kid was about one year old, and I was able to finally get some stuff done through naptimes, etc. A lot of the mental health aspects of it are actually drawn from the depression and anxiety that went either side of having my kid. Riza's brief disassociative episode (certainty over Dove's death) is based on a day-long dissociative episode I had near the end of that pregnancy, and her inability to sleep following that due to anxiety about her surroundings, is based on the nightmares I had in hospital that stopped me from sleeping properly, even when I wasn't being woken up by my son. Even in the early chapters, the way Riza thinks about feeling her tattoo is incredibly drawn from my own trauma during labour, and how I would find myself randomly crying about it even 6 months after giving birth because I could still remember the pain - and how a few months after that I would still cry about it, even as I stopped being able to remember, and I felt like I shouldn't feel upset about it anymore because the memory of the sensation was gone. I felt like I should remember the pain.
> 
> Considering all of that (and that's only the trauma that I've put INTO the story), I recently found out I'm pregnant again. We're happy about it, for sure, but there has been a toll of physical exhaustion and mental ... everything. I will continue to write this story (and maybe ever get more material of pain for it!), but I'm not able to write as much, and after the kid is born I'll probably not be able to write at all for another ... 6-12 months.
> 
> Thank you for reading, everyone who's been with the story so far, and be assured that as soon as I knew I was pregnant again and entering a crop-field full of triggers, I got a referral for a psychologist (who I've been seeing for a month or so, now). I've also qualified for extra support from a community nurse, so I have mental and practical help on hand. Prayers and well-wishes are appreciated.
> 
> Also, if anyone is a part of an FMA discord community that isn't too huge, I'd love to join one so I have people to chat with about FMA and stuff. The old forums are all deeaaaad, and making a tumblr for it seems like too much work, especially right now.


	20. Chapter Nineteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The structure of the chapters is changing from here on, so for this one time only, have two chapters at once! They are smaller, and I do not know if that will be a trend from here, but I felt it was necessary to avoid too much cliffhanger, and to ease into the new chapter format.

_Hey Riza,_

_They’re finally moving me on from . My back is killing me from all the lifting! I know training is meant to get you in shape for all of this, but I think we arms are spaghetti even when I wake up in the mornings._

_I can’t tell whether I’m looking forward to the change or not, finally putting my skills to their intended use and all. I’ve been reading your letters again and again, but I think it’s just making me nervous. There’s not much that can prepare you for shooting someone, I bet. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, we’re soldiers, right? I knew this would happen when I signed up! . Brekker and Davis have had this competition going since we got here, about who was going to get more Ishvalans, and the funniest thing is that we’ve only had one attack on since we got here, and neither of them was on duty to do anything about it. Boo hoo, go cry into your lumpy pillows that you didn’t get to shoot anything, ._

_Anyway, I’ve been thinking about you. Write me again so I know you’re not dead, okay?_  
_Xx_

Rebecca never signed her letters. Maybe she thought that she couldn’t get in trouble for leaking military information if she didn’t sign off. The censors were thorough enough to cover for her, though, and there was still enough left for Hawkeye to still get a sense of her friend.

When the mail started coming through again, she was surprised to find she had three letters waiting for her, all in Rebecca’s rushed writing. This was the last, dated not too long ago. Hawkeye found herself trying to recall the maps she’d seen with actual military activity on them, wondering where Rebecca would be posted to. It had been a while since she’d seen any of that. They weren’t free with that sort of information to low-ranking soldiers.

The small details that had slipped past the censor about Rebecca’s previous location had been comforting. It sounded like a small village, maybe on the edge of the border between Ishval and proper Amestrian territory. There was a lot of activity, by the sound of it, but it didn’t seem combat-based. Maybe helping remove rubble or clear an area from the evidence of battle, something like that. There had been mention of friendly, living locals, so it can’t have been fully in the war-zone.

Now, though, Rebecca was likely to be thrown into some situation part way between that and what Hawkeye was in. All she could think was that if Rebecca was being sent to the front lines, please, whatever power there was, let it be to here. Let it be to a place where the two of them could be a comfort to one another, where maybe Hawkeye would be able to play a part in protecting her friend. But at the same time, she had no desire to see Rebecca as far forward as this. Let her stay out on the outskirts. There was plenty of work to be done further from combat.

Over the next few days, Hawkeye’s mind kept straying back to that letter, wondering where Rebecca ended up, trying to write a response that wouldn’t be too gloomy. What sort of encouragement could she send to a person about to see combat? “Don’t die”?

It wasn’t entirely surprising when she started seeing familiar faces through the camp again. More soldiers rotating duties, and a new handful of cadets here to bolster the platoons. Apparently the encouragement she had been considering giving Rebecca had been liberally spread around, because she found herself being greeted one day with a rehashing of the sentiment.

“Oh, so _you’ve_ managed not to die so far, then?”

She was on her way to exchange places with a sniper for her shift on watch, but had to pause as her brain tried to process what was going on. Incredulous look spreading on her face, Hawkeye turned stiffly to see who was taunting her.

Jameson Barr stood there, his uniform as neat as when she’d last seen him in the cafeteria back at the Eastern HQ, smirking like a twit. “Is that, uh, luck, or can you give me tips on whose ‘pocket’ I have to be in?”

It took no time at all for an older soldier passing by to laugh at him. “Gotta get your hands out of your own pockets before you go reaching into someone else’s, little boy.”

As Jameson whipped around to defend his dignity, Hawkeye slipped off to her duty, trying to leave behind the scowl that had settled on her. His taunts had rarely been directed at her at the academy, Rebecca presenting the more outspoken target, but there was always that insinuation that they didn’t belong there – that their presence, and particularly their rankings, were due to whatever sexual favours he thought they’d been providing to everyone but him.

She saw him again a few days later, looking grimmer and more scuffled, now. His eyes paused on her as he passed, then he looked away. Was that shame, or just a new type of disdain? They said that war changed everyone.

The explosions had started again, off in the distance of the city. Not the smoky, black ones of the Crimson Alchemist, but the red-hot flames that belonged to her. It had been a while since she’d seen them. Since she’d seen _him_ , either – that weary-eyed man-child hiding behind the actions of a monster. Was he still able to comprehend the ideals that had sent him here, or were they so tattered that he was just a hollowed-out shell? Like her?

What had she come here for, again? To save people? How was she meant to do that with a gun?

It had been a week or so since the explosions started up again, when the front line started lurching forward once more. They’d been stalled in the same area long enough that some of the makeshift-barracks had withstood half a dozen or so attacks – the initial Amestrian takeover, and numerous Ishvalan forays into the camp since then. Some of the platoons took pride in it, boasting about how safe their bunks were, having stood the test. All Hawkeye could hope for was that Petrova would manage to secure the women a spot again that wasn’t on the edge of the lines. It was some sort of administrative magic the woman had, finding a safe space for them.

For four days straight they made new camps, sometimes marching forward a few hundred metres or sometimes only fifty. When they reached it, Hawkeye almost didn’t recognise the spot where Colonel Grand’s mission had encountered the Ishvalan ambush – the street was crowded with soldiers, and the protective wall they’d left behind them had been merged back into the street. She was on the ground, helping to carry gear, instead of on guard on the rooftops. It just wasn’t the same way she’d approached it.

Beyond that point, the area was unrecognisable. She’d been through, the one time, blundering through dark streets and scampering over rooftops, shaking and smelling the scent of death pursuing her. It was different in daytime, and anyway, she’d not seen it from this angle.

They didn’t get out as far as that mission had taken her. As the buildings started petering out, the Amestrian advance slowed – not due to any problems with the combat, but so that they could camp in the more sheltered parts of the Daliha district. The open streets before them wouldn’t have the same protection as the narrow spaces, but the narrow spaces would allow the Ishvalans to get closer. The troops moved as close as they could to the divide between the two spaces and started hunkering down, there. Sandbags to limit street access, suspect buildings alchemically sealed, possible approaches evaluated and overseen by new sniper nests. Risky tactics with a bandage slapped on top to try to keep it manageable. Maybe this was just what war was.

Lieutenant Petrova came through, as always. Their new accommodation was a squat house in the middle of a street, the house on one side being used for food storage and the building on the other side dwarfing it – Hawkeye thought it was a school, perhaps. Smaller than the massive school compounds in Eastern City, made for hundreds or thousands of children at a time, but bigger than the house where she had first attended school along with the other children in her village. The large rooms and narrow hallways were unlike a lot of other Ishvalan structures, and it worked well for the medical team who set up in there, with significant room for patients on cots, and very little wasted space.

The proximity worked well for Jonte, who now didn’t have to trek through half a camp to get to her shifts, but Hawkeye watched as injured soldiers streamed in and out of next door, wondering how many more there would be before the war finished. Would these men get sent home because of their injuries, or made to join in the fighting as soon as they were out of bed?

Sentry duties took her further out from camp than they had before. There were plenty of people stationed around the camp, along the barricades they’d built, and in addition to that the snipers were claiming whichever buildings overlooked a decent amount of territory. There was a tower on the edge of the building line which she had pointed out to Captain Hughes. It wasn’t too far from the camp, but it set a perimeter wider than the current guard lines held, and would have an extraordinary view over the wreckage. There was also the added bonus of keeping Ishvalans from taking a building that overlooked the camp.

Aerugo’s last few shipments of weapons had seen an increase in enemy sniper activity, and with the alchemists drawing so much attention to themselves, defending against the enemy snipers was one of the main ways to keep the war rolling towards its end. The Wind Alchemist was their first big casualty – he took a shot to the neck which Jonte thought he could have survived if it wasn’t for the infection that set in afterwards: “By some miracle it missed everything important, but we just didn’t have any clean bandages left.”

Whose was the miracle, then? The Amestrians’ or Ishvala’s?

In her lonely tower, Hawkeye sat and watched the battlefield, eyes peeled for movement. Sometimes she skimmed past a human shape and had to come back to verify if they were a corpse or not. It was hard to keep up with clearing the corpses when they moved ahead so quickly, and the Ishvalans who came back to collect their dead were fewer and fewer. Once the Amestrian casualties were cleared, the Ishvalans were left on their own to rot.

It was there, in that tower, that she saw him again.

The land she overlooked was strewn with houses destroyed by mortars as Ishvalans were herded together for the alchemists to kill. There was rubble everywhere, and yet it was somehow also Amestrian territory now – a place where the Ishvalans could find cover if they tried, but the presence of snipers and the proximity of the rest of the battalion made it a death trap for them. Not all Ishvalans cared about that, if they could take down the right target, but still it was a place that was claimed.

Maybe that’s what made the two Amestrian soldiers think it was safe for them to wander there. They came around the edges of the camp with a sense of just looking out over the desolation of this once-great city – two soldiers with dark hair and pale skin, strolling along, hands in pockets as though they were safe, even out here.

Hawkeye had been watching this space for hours, now, but she wasn’t here to stop platoons of visible enemies from approaching – just to watch for the tell-tale signs of snipers setting up shop, and Ishvalans using the wreckage to sneak in closer.

She did a sweep of the area around them, looking to find what they were walking into. Buildings that had been brought down on their owners’ heads, crags and piles of brick where anyone could be hiding – even the odd wall still standing, which was all the protection someone needed from her. She found herself caught between trying to skim past the torn limbs and half-buried corpses, and scanning over them once again to make sure their owners were actually dead.

A third man joined the soldiers briefly, shocking Hawkeye into a new level of alertness when he saluted one of the soldiers. Didn’t that idiot know that you don’t salute where enemy combatants could see you? May as well put a target on the other man’s back.

He left them shortly, but his conspicuous “yes, sir”ing must have been noticed by someone other than her, because it was only a minute or two before the movement she’d feared finally came. Brick and rubble heaved up, cascading as one of the bodies in the debris unearthed itself, the Ishvalan jumping to his feet with the speed of a man with purpose – and the dagger of one, too.

Hawkeye lined up her shot quickly, as the man raised his dagger. He was side-on to her, his arm blocking a great deal of the head from her, but if she was lucky her bullet would still get him – through the head, or through the wrist and making him drop the weapon.

She managed the head as he lunged. There was mingling relief and anxiety in her chest as she watched for anyone else taking the opportunity to attack.

The soldiers had spun around at the man’s approach, but were too slow to do anything about it. Whether this incident would make them wary enough to be careful or surer of their invincibility was another matter. They’d certainly been put on the tips of their toes now, though. Casual stroll over, one of them ducked for cover, just as surprised by her shot as by the man who had attacked them, and as she finally caught their faces in her scope, she froze.

The Flame Alchemist’s face reappeared above the wall he’d chosen for his cover, looking towards her. Even so, he was off his mark, looking too low by far.

He would be nothing more than another bullet to any sniper out there. To her.

 _You could just do it,_ something whispered, _you could just take the shot now and end him, end the destruction you’ve caused._

The silence rang loud in her ears.

_Then all you’d have left to endure of the war is the same pain and guilt everyone else is feeling. Only your share of it all._

And she wanted to. He’d never wanted this, after all – maybe it would release him as much as it would her. After all, it his death could always be blamed on an enemy sniper – the Wind Alchemist was precedent for that.

The grip on her gun grew slick with sweat as the other man – Captain Hughes, Hawkeye realised – turned back to camp, gesturing for the alchemist to follow him. If there was any time, it was now. Her finger quivered as she touched it to the trigger. A part of her hesitated, remembering those beautiful dreams and wondering if there was any way they could still come true. She paused on the precipice, heart in her mouth.

 _Could you do it?_ the voice goaded.

A gesture from Hughes drew the Flame Alchemist’s attention, bringing his gaze up. The harried expression on his face disappeared as his frown deepened. He stared almost directly into the barrel of her rifle and she stared back.

They turned and walked away, two easy, lonesome targets hurrying back into safety. No, she couldn’t have done it. Hughes would have known. He would have told the higher ups what had happened, and she would be executed for treason. She couldn’t die until she’d found a way to destroy the tattoo.

That’s what she told herself, to chase away the memory of those hunted eyes. For a man who had such power at the tips of his gloves, he was still a boy.

Footsteps coming up the tower brought her to the present. A voice called up the stairwell before she had time to be concerned: “All right, Hawkeye?” Just the replacement for the shift swap over.

“All right,” she replied, and began to gather her things to head back to camp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me writing that last scene: And then she shot him.  
> *add the AU tag at the last minute*  
> NOW THE STORY REALLY CHANGES
> 
> Ahh, that’d be funny, but alas I have too many plans to derail it now :’)


	21. Chapter Twenty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have just posted two chapters at once and this is the second. If you've skipped straight to the end of the story, go back one so you don't miss out on the previous bit!
> 
> I have taken liberties with the manga dialogue, but I’m trying to stick with its intent – I’m just changing how it does that.

When the Ishvalan leapt at them, Mustang ran through three thoughts: that he had no way to protect himself, that he’d not been this close range to an enemy for a long time, and that if all it took to die was for someone to get this close, then he’d been surviving on an unfair advantage this whole time.

When the side of the man’s head exploded, it paused the reel of his life flashing before his eyes, before it started again in double speed – apparently proximity wasn’t the only problem.

“A sniper?!” he yelled, ducking behind cover and finally managing to slip his glove over his hand.

“Cool it, Roy.”

A sniper could have been anywhere, hard for him to target and take out, even when his alchemy had as large an area of effect as it did, but Maes just stood there in the open, breathing his little sigh of relief, and no attack came for him. As the rush of fear settled, Mustang realised it must have been one of theirs. Not a shot aimed at him that missed and got the Ishvalan, but an Amestrian sniper protecting them.

“Got the Eye of the Hawk watching over us, today,” Maes said, peering over the crumbling wall.

The wording was eerie. “… The hawk?” Mustang echoed, looking up at his friend.

“Yeah,” Maes continued. The relief in his voice disappeared as he became more contemplative. “A bit of a no-name among us, and nobody really knows what to do with her. She’s an officer cadet, but at least she’s a crack shot. That’s why she was sent to the frontlines.”

Mustang forced a laugh out. “Huh. They were desperate enough to drag a cadet outfield … Looks like this country really is beyond hope.”

Just about every soldier had a nickname, more often than not something derogatory or making fun of them. Even the tough sounding nicknames like “Chopper” were more often than not because the man had accidentally cut his own finger off, or something to make fun of the guy instead of something holding him up to glory. Half of the alchemist titles were like that, too – as though the Fuhrer hadn’t quite grown out of his own foot-soldier state of mind. This one, though …

He remembered the first time he’d seen Miss Hawkeye bring home birds she’d shot herself. Pheasants or something – he didn’t know. He’d been looking out of the window, trying to complete the equation Master Hawkeye had given him, and caught sight of her, all of twelve or thirteen with a few dead birds in her hand, and the old hunting rifle held up against her shoulder. She’d plucked them and gutted them herself, disposing of the parts that weren’t as palatable like just another chore. He’d been amazed that a girl that young could -- shoot so well? Was allowed to go out hunting by herself? The whole situation perplexed him, but he admired Master Hawkeye so much that he thought little of it, and she was so often away at school that it became just another oddity, living in the house of a genius.

Please don’t let it be her.

The expression on Maes’ face gave him pause. “You’re really out of touch, aren’t you, Roy?”

He’d been so caught up with his own train of thought that it threw him. “What?”

“She isn’t the only cadet here. There are dozens of them.”

It was like a slap in the face. “Dozens?” Mustang asked, stunned.

Maes shrugged, disillusioned eyes belying the smile on his face. “Maybe more. Who else could they use to fill the gaps of the dead in our platoons?”

“But – the reserve forces?”

“The war’s been going for seven years. What reserves are left?”

When the two of them had graduated the war had been going for four years already, but still they weren’t called up into action straight away. It hadn’t been full-out war at first – just an insurrection that a handful of troops were sent to help with, but it spiralled so badly. How long was it before Ishval was devouring Amestrian soldiers? He didn’t even know – he hadn’t joined it at the same time as his class, because he’d left them. When he was accepted as a State Alchemist, he went his separate path, no longer bound to the same unit. They joined the war at some point while he was still in Central, testing different gloves to try to get some that would make the spark his transmutation needed. He was out of touch, even with his own graduating class.

With a final look back at their assailant, they scrambled out of there, making their way back to camp. Their attention to the environment was heightened now, every pile of rubble a potential attacker, but Maes seemed to notice Mustang’s gaze wandering higher than that.

“There,” he said, pointing up to a handful of buildings that hadn’t been bombed – further away than Mustang had expected. “She’s got an eye for finding good vantage points.”

Maes was a good man. As they got close to camp, he noted the shift changeover was happening, and said they should go thank their sniper hero. Mustang was nonchalant in his agreement. That sounded like something Maes would do – go out of his way to make friends with everyone. How the man had the energy for it, Mustang didn’t know. It could have been the distance between being a soldier and being an alchemist, or maybe he was just scared that anyone he got to know here would die, but Mustang had fairly successfully avoided getting to know anyone. This time, though, he needed to know.

“There she is,” Maes said, tapping Mustang on the shoulder and already greeting a hunched figure at a fire as Mustang noticed her.

His stomach dropped as she stood, his eyes catching on that familiar face and any chance that it had been someone else out there on the field disappearing.

“It’s been a long time, Mister Mustang,” Miss Hawkeye said. Her eyes were hollow, the skin around them sunken and dark, just like every other soldier. Still, they were sharp as ever, twitching to his uniform, the coat covering his epaulettes. “No. That should be Major Mustang now. Sir. Do you still remember me?”

The gloves in his pocket grew heavy with the weight of her words.

He remembered long days in the Hawkeye household, helping out his mentor and basking in the attention the man poured on him. He remembered the young girl returning for the occasional weekend or school holiday from the boarding school his tuition helped pay for. He’d felt relief that there was someone else around to help with the chores in the house, because it meant that he could spend more time dreaming about alchemy and the great things he’d be able to do with it. It meant that he could imagine himself as Master Hawkeye’s assistant as he worked towards completing his research on flame alchemy – and what a great discovery that would be! At three years younger than him, that girl hadn’t drawn his attention. He was too involved in his studies, and enamoured with his hermit-like teacher, and as much as he enjoyed flirting with girls his own age, she was just a kid with little to offer him.

After two years he left Master Hawkeye’s tutelage to make a difference in the world, the hermit still holding a dear place in his heart, despite his railing against the government. Master Hawkeye didn’t see how once you were a part of the system, it could change because of the influence you had on it.

How dilapidated the house had seemed when he returned, asking the man to teach him more about alchemy. If he just knew enough, he’d be able to become a state alchemist – and protect the country from the threats it faced on almost every border. That same day his master (his hero) had died in squalor, in pain, and in full vision of that little girl, finally big enough to wear her mother’s old clothes. He remembered the fear in her eyes as she looked on at her dying father – and yet the quiet acceptance at his funeral.

He remembered the sense of duty he felt towards her, as her father’s pupil – surely someone should help take care of her – and for that he paid for her father’s burial and gave her a card to look him up if she had any difficulties striking it out on her own. She’d said she could find work on her own. A secretary, he’d thought. Or maybe at the corner store where he’d walked every other day to pick up Master Hawkeye’s groceries. Not this.

He remembered her smile as she listened to him talk about his hopes for the future – hopes that were a shattered remnant of what they had been; without his master alive to teach him more, he’d just be a foot-soldier, dead on the side of the road after a year or so. But he’d have given what he could for his country, and that was something to hold on to.

It was their first real conversation, and when she offered him her father’s secrets the part of him that wanted to be so much more than just a soldier leapt back into life. The horror he felt when he saw the tattoo was tempered by his own ambitions. He was ashamed, now, at how eager he was to get his hands on flame alchemy. Not only because of the perverseness of the whole situation (she was still so young)(his romanticised illusions about Master Hawkeye’s isolated academia were shattered)(was he any different, hovering over her, transcribing the tattoo as though he were reading from a book instead of the back of a girl who had been treated by her father as though she was nothing of herself, but only what he made of her? --) No, not only because of that, but because of how he used that alchemy now. She’d offered him a way to protect, and all he’d done was destroy.

In the years since he’d seen her, he’d remembered that same round face that he’d said goodbye to, and let it live on in his daydreams as though he was going to save her from what her father had done. When the war stripped away his sense of his own goodness and the justness of his cause, he imagined that quiet town and how peaceful it was, and what a peaceful life he could have trying to save her from the wretchedness of her situation. If he couldn’t be a hero in war, he could be one there. She was nothing to him before that – only an extension of her father, just as her father had also seen her – but now she became the image of the good life he could live, being the excellent man who saved her from her own personal agony, while she saved him from his. He would still be a hero, to her, and she would nurse him back to stability.

What a stupid dream. He’d never thought of her twice in that way until he knew about the research her father had made her bear. The idea of ‘saving’ her, protecting her was still all about him.

Did he remember her?

“Like I could forget,” he responded mechanically. He looked at those dead eyes – the eyes of someone who had waded through blood. He hadn’t saved her from anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the choice of first names/last names has become really apparent through this chapter, with the whole “Mustang” and yet “Maes” divide, if it wasn’t already apparent before this. I want to point out that I have a purpose behind who I call by what. It started out with Hawkeye’s character. You may have noticed that at the start of the story, she was referred to by the third person narrator as “Riza”, and at some point it switched from that to “Hawkeye”. This was not arbitrary. The voice of the narrator – the names it uses – are based on whose perspective it is. At first, Hawkeye thought of herself as “Riza”. Then at some point in the war, when she started to identify less with herself, she became more distant even with her own sense of self, and she started thinking of herself as “Hawkeye”. There was almost a whole chapter, I think, where I made that change a-nd intentionally had a huuuuge block where she was only referred to by the pronouns “she”/”her”. This was partly because in action, who has time for a sense of self? And partly because I was intentionally creating a space between where the narrator referred to her as “Riza” and where it was “Hawkeye”, so that you readers wouldn’t feel too jarred by the transition. Not to hide it, just to smooth it over, because it also wasn’t a sudden thing for Hawkeye. It was a day where she started out feeling still something like herself, and she ended up feeling like someone else.
> 
> I have referred to Mustang as “Mustang” the entire time, to my knowledge. In dialogue, it’s purely about the person talking, so Hughes calls him “Roy”, but that’s more about Hughes’ perception of Mustang than anything else. I chose “Mustang”, because he was already a soldier for quite a while when we cut into his train of thought. He could be “Roy”, “Mustang”, or “the Flame Alchemist”, and I felt like he would think of himself somewhere in the middle. I don’t think he could truly think of himself as “the Flame Alchemist” without dying a bit more inside, or it being some sort of joke. But he still thinks of Hughes just as “Maes”. Weirdly, I feel like he would call him “Hughes”, but at the same time, Hughes is his closest connection to that life before Ishval, who would actually understand where he’s at. So while Hughes calls Mustang “Roy”, Mustang calls Hughes “Hughes” but thinks of him as “Maes”.


End file.
